Open Season

by Archer Mayor

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “You wait. I work. Most of the stuff is in an incubator right now. It’ll stay there overnight. There are a couple of things I can do in the meantime but not much, except make a few phone calls and rearrange everyone else’s schedule.”

  “We do appreciate this—a lot.”

  “It’s okay. Why don’t you come back in about three days? We’ll see what we’ve got.”

  I got up, but Frank didn’t move. “You wouldn’t have a corner we could bunk in, would you?”

  Kees’s eyes widened. “You mean stay here?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because we don’t know for sure what’s going on. We think Ski Mask is just pushing to reopen the case. We think he’s bumped off some guy just to get our interest. We think he and us are the only people involved in this thing, and I’d lay bets he followed us here. But we don’t know any of that for sure. There’s an equally strong possibility that there’s a separate bunch just as hell-bent on keeping a lid on this, to the point that they almost killed my partner here, and that they too are hot on our tail. That cooler is the only thing so far that isn’t pure invention, and I’m not about to leave it behind in a half-demolished building and spend two days going to the movies. Is that all right with you guys?”

  Kees shrugged. “We’ve got the room and the furniture… God knows we’re not too crowded. Be my guests. Just don’t get underfoot, okay?”

  Murphy stood up and nodded. “You got it.”

  I followed him out the door, closing it behind me. “You really going to do this?”

  “You bet your butt. You get a star witness that can bust a case wide open, what do you do with him? You sit on him until they need him. That cooler’s our witness.”

  “It may not be, Frank.”

  He turned and poked me in the chest with his finger. “Maybe not. That was my tune until last night. Now I’m singing yours. So humor me.”

  I held up both palms in surrender. “Consider yourself humored.”

  We found a room with a few pieces of machinery, all of it unplugged, and a pile of tables, desks, filing cabinets, and armchairs. Several pillows on the floor made for serviceable if lumpy beds. Murphy borrowed my car keys, disappeared for a couple of hours, and returned with some magazines, a couple of pulp novels, enough junk food to hold us for a week, and a rented TV.

  The next two-and-a-half days passed slowly. Frank and I watched, as the hours crawled by, morning news shows, midmorning talk shows, midday news shows, hours of soap opera, more hours of pre-dinner sitcom reruns, evening news shows, prime-time whiz-bangers, late night action shows, more now-stale news, and finally the twilight zone of Leno, Letterman, old movies and more reruns.

  We stood around, we sat, we lay on our pillows, we read a little, we washed at the basin in the half-finished bathroom. We waited.

  Every once in a while, we caught a glimpse of Kees or his cowgirl in the hallway. They politely bade us good night on their way out every evening and gave us a cheery good morning hours later, but we kept out of their hair and they didn’t seek us out. On the morning of the third day, the sound of heavy equipment starting up outside told us the strike had been settled.

  But it wasn’t until the fourth day that Kees appeared in our doorway and asked us to follow him to his office.

  After that amount of time, and the bored tension that went with it, my druthers were to come face-to-face with tangible results—like a reconstructed body or at least a steamer trunk filled with evidence. But aside from a few sheets of paper lying in the middle of his desk, Kees’s office looked unchanged from before.

  We sat down like two rumpled old men awaiting counseling and watched Kees assume his by now traditional pose. “What do you know about blood typing?”

  Murphy opened his mouth, but I beat him to it. “Hillstrom told me something about Hs and secretors and PG-something-or-other sub-typing that gets the blood more and more specific to a single person.”

  “Okay. That gives me an idea of how to approach this. Let’s back up, though, and look at what we’ve got. From what you told me and from Beverly’s samples, I figure we’ve got two categories: the physical evidence—things like the underwear, the rope, the broken lamp, the general signs of a struggle, stuff like that. And the tissue samples, taken from a variety of sources—the fetus, the semen, the stains on the sheet, etc.

  “Now on the first, you guys are the experts. Your living is going around matching evidence with unwitnessed action. What I do isn’t that different. What I’m going to tell you is part scientific fact, and part educated conjecture. When you leave here, in other words, you’ll have more than you had, but you’re still going to have to put the pieces together on your own. Okay?”

  We both nodded.

  “All right. Now you nailed the suspect… What’s his name?”

  “Davis.”

  “You nailed Davis as a group O secretor—the same as both semen samples. We tested both as separate entities because as far as we know, they might have been placed by different men.”

  Murphy shook his head. “Lovely thought.”

  “But unfortunately realistic, although not necessarily in the way you think. She may have been attacked simultaneously by two men, but she might also have had intercourse with one man, come home, and been attacked by a second. Here’s an instance where conjecture takes over, in fact. I seriously doubt that a woman would receive semen in either one of these two areas, and then put her clothes back on and walk home. It is only reasonable to assume it all happened at once. Had one of the deposits been inside her vagina, I wouldn’t necessarily take that position.

  “In any case, the whole thing is a little ephemeral because the mouth sample pretty much stops there—at O secretor. It’s far too contaminated by the victim’s saliva to be analyzed any further. That, luckily, is not the case with the pubic sample.

  “The typing and subtyping Beverly told you about is called Phospho-Gluco-Mutations typing, or PGM for short. Basically, it’s an enzyme that is polymorphic, meaning different people have different types. At this point, we’ve determined ten subtypes in the population. With time, we’ll probably get more, but in your case, this was enough.”

  “So you did get something,” Murphy asked.

  “Oh yes. Here, look at this.” Kees took the top sheet of paper off his little pile and slid it across the desk. In neat, penciled handwriting, there was a single column of figures:

  Suspect

  Group O secretor

  PGM type 2 - 1

  subtype 2 + 1 +

  ESD 1

  GLO 2-1

  ACP BA

  “That’s Mr. Davis. Here’s the semen.” He slid the second sheet over:

  Semen

  Group O secretor

  PGM type 1

  subtype 1 + 1 +

  ESD 1

  GLO 1

  ACP BA

  I couldn’t resist a smile. “So they don’t match.”

  “Nope.”

  “How about the fetus?”

  “Okay, now on the fetus… Well, to back up a little, you know that a fetus is a product of its parents.”

  Murphy sighed.

  “Meaning that if you have one parent and the fetus, you can get a vague notion of the missing parent’s makeup. You can also therefore exclude people who do not fit that vague makeup. Which leads me to this.” And he slid the third sheet toward us:

  Mother

  Group A

  PGM 2

  subtype 2 + 2 +

  ESD 1

  GLO 1

  ACP B

  Fetus

  Group B

  PGM 2 - 1

  subtype 2 + 1 -

  ESD 1

  GLO 2 - 1

  ACP B

  Father

  Group B or AB

  PGM 1 — 1, 1 + 1 -, 2 + 1 -, or 2 - 1 -

  -----

  ESD 1 or 2 - 1

  GLO 2 or 2
- 1

  ACP B, BA or CB

  We both stared at it; Kees saved us from asking any idiotic questions. “To summarize that in English, Davis is neither the semen depositor nor the father of the fetus. But neither is the real semen depositor the father, so now you’ve got three men.”

  “Davis, the man who attacked her, and the father.”

  Kees made a steeple of his fingers. “No. Davis, the depositor, and the father. If Beverly’s guess is right—that the semen was brought to the site and deposited artificially—then Davis could have been the one who attacked her. After all, you still have all that physical evidence against him.”

  “Oh, come on,” Murphy said. “I don’t buy that crap about the semen being poured all over her like salad dressing. People don’t do that.”

  “Perhaps not, but other possibilities exist. There might have been two attackers—Davis and the depositor—and you only got Davis.”

  Murphy rubbed his forehead.

  “Or even, to humor Beverly once again, the father and Davis might have been in cahoots and the semen secured from some innocent third party and, once again, artificially placed.”

  “Come on.”

  Kees laughed, enjoying his devil’s advocacy. “If push came to shove and I were placed on the witness stand and a very sharp lawyer asked me, ‘Dr. Kees, since all you could get from the sample in the mouth was Group O secretor, doesn’t that mean it could have been Davis’s semen, even though the other sample was not?’ I would have to answer yes. I would also have to concede that in cases of gang assault such evidence is not rare.”

  “Meaning that Davis might have deposited one of the semen samples?”

  “It’s possible. I told you I couldn’t give you answers—just information. Now I have to admit I tend to agree with Captain Murphy. People usually do the simplest thing in these situations. They are rarely operating at their highest mental capacity. Chances are Davis was framed by a man who sexually assaulted the young woman and then killed her, or the other way around. But I’m afraid what I’ve given you doesn’t prove that—it merely suggests it.”

  There was a long silence in the room. I have to admit, the joy I’d felt at hearing the semen wasn’t Davis’s had vanished. I’d seen enough lawyers at work to know that the information we’d just received didn’t even warrant a reopening of the case, much less a retrial. My only consolation was that Frank looked as down as I was. Several days ago, he would have been grinning from ear to ear.

  Kees, on the other hand, was still smiling. “I feel I ought to add at this point that that,” and he pointed at the three sheets of paper, “is not the only thing I found.”

  We both looked at him, Murphy obviously peeved.

  “One of the reasons all this took a little longer than I planned was that I ran the semen by a couple of extra tests. One of them came up with the fact that the depositor was taking a drug called prednisone at the time he ejaculated.

  “It’s a common prescription drug, a glucocorticoid, to be exact. Pharmacists sell it for its anti-inflammatory properties to treat everything from asthma to arthritis to poison ivy. Now there is a large family of glucocorticoid drugs. Prednisone is cheaper than most of the others, but it is more potent and far likelier to cause side effects. As such, I would doubt it was administered for something minor like poison ivy; I’d guess it was more like arthritis or asthma.”

  “It sounds like you’re saying the depositor was an old man in a wheelchair.”

  “For the arthritis, you may be right. That is mostly found among the elderly. But asthma is something else. A lot of young and otherwise healthy people suffer from it.”

  He got up from his chair and stood by the window, looking out.

  “I’m also inclined to think it was either one or the other of those because they’re long-term ailments, and indications are that the depositor had been taking this medicine for four weeks or more.”

  “What indications?”

  He hesitated a moment. “Understand that all this gets into the speculative. I mean, I have certain scientific indices to go by, but my conclusions are really my own.”

  “All right.”

  “During the testing, I found both a slightly lower sperm count and a lower amount of the body’s naturally produced hydrocortisone. Now the first is no real indication of anything—tight pants can knock off sperm—but the second, taken with the first and coupled to the presence of prednisone, is a red flag for Cushing’s syndrome.”

  Neither Frank nor I moved or said a word. Both of us felt that in his understated way, Robert Kees was about to make us a gift.

  “I almost hate to tell you this, because it’s so thin, but I do feel I’ve let you down a little with the other stuff. But take it all with a giant grain of salt.” He cleared his throat. “If you take prednisone for a month or more, chances are you’ll start to bloat—retaining fluids you normally pass to the outside. Usually, that’s where it stops, but every once in a while—and I’m talking rarely here—you develop Cushing’s. You become weak and overweight, with a rounded, pinkish moon face; you bruise easily, suffer from occasional delirium and depression, and any psychological disorders can become exaggerated. But the most telling thing about Cushing’s, at least physically, is the emergence of a kind of buffalo hump high on the back.”

  “You mean the guy’s a hunchback?” Murphy asked.

  I put my hand on his forearm to quiet him.

  “Now, assuming that all this fell into place, which is highly unlikely though possible, there is no way to determine how long the depositor was on the medicine, why he took it in the first place, or whether he’s still on it. Furthermore, just as the syndrome appears after a month or more, it disappears a month or less after treatment is terminated.”

  Kees sat back down. “What I’m giving you here is my educated guess. Because of the low hydrocortisone level in the sample, I’d say there’s an outside chance your man did develop Cushing’s—that would make him stand out in a crowd. Furthermore, for the hundreds of people who might be issued one of the prednisone family of drugs from any given urban pharmacy, only two to five will have prescriptions running for over a week to ten days.”

  I glanced over to Murphy’s face. He looked back, smiled, and nodded. “Now that’s a lead.”

  14

  IT WAS MID AFTERNOON before we picked our way through the scaffolding, the workmen, and the piles of construction material outside the doorless lobby of Kees’s building. It was snowing again, as it had been almost all week. TV reports had broadcast travel advisories for that morning, and from what I could see, or couldn’t see, things were not improving.

  We found the car, the only white, furry-looking, rounded lump in the now-crowded parking lot, and put our bags and the cooler in the back seat. Glancing over my shoulder as I pulled out the ice scraper, I saw the building we’d just left as the vaguest of shadows on a whited-out television screen.

  “Christ, it’s really coming down,” Murphy said as he wiped the snow from the windshield with his gloved hand.

  I handed him the scraper after I’d done my side. “You want to pass on going home? We could spend the night at some motel.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sick of sleeping where I don’t belong—we’ve been through worse than this.” He finished clearing the windshield and opened the door, adding, “Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to give Ski Mask a little run for his money. If he is on our trail, maybe we’ll find out if he’s a flatlander or not.”

  Boasts like that aside, drivers in New England handle heavy snow the same way everyone else does—they cling to the right lane and crawl. By the time I got to the interstate heading north, I knew we were in for a very long trip. Occasionally, in the straightaways, when the wind would briefly shift and open up visibility, I’d venture onto the white-crusted, slippery passing lane to overtake a couple of my more timid fellow travelers, but for the most part we were stuck in line. My eyes strained to see through the flurries to the blurry outline of th
e car just ahead.

  “I wonder how many people go off the road because they follow the guy in front of them?”

  Frank grunted. “You thinking of doing that?”

  “I’ve heard of it happening.”

  He didn’t respond. He was wearing a shapeless black coat and a fake-fur trooper hat with the flaps pulled down over his ears. His chin was buried in a brown scarf. He looked like a tired Russian commuter sitting on a bus.

  “Why don’t you turn up the heat?”

  He shook his head. “Makes me sleepy.”

  “So sleep. You can take over at Hartford.”

  “Naw. So what are we going to do now?”

  “I say we dig into Kimberly Harris. We know damned well she wasn’t the innocent victim of a drug-crazed loner.”

  “Got any guesses?”

  “A couple. Floyd Rubin, for instance.”

  “The pharmacist?”

  “He could be the father.”

  “Are you kidding? I thought she just worked there.”

  “He said they were friends, but it may have been more. It’s pure hunch right now, but she was five-and-a-half months pregnant when she died—and that was five months after she quit Charlie’s.”

  “Does that make him Ski Mask too?”

  “You’ve never seen the man. I think he’s clear there, but he could easily be her four-thousand-dollar-a-month sugar daddy. Those payments also started near the time she quit and went up to the end. I’d love to be able to look at his bank records, but I doubt we could get a warrant.”

  “We could get around that, maybe.”

  “Wouldn’t risk it. If it does give us something, we’d never be able to use it in court. We might wear him down—imply we’ve already got the records or something.”

  “What about Ski Mask? Why not bring in some outside help?”

  “I doubt we have the choice anymore. We had one body when we left four days ago; that’s more than we’ve had in the last three years. I’d be surprised if the selectmen haven’t forced Brandt to bring in everybody but the Mounties by now. Gail said they’d soon be looking for someone to hang.”