The Last Word

by Lee Goldberg

  He thought about offering to help, but he realized his presence would only make her job harder. Amanda knew what she was doing and she would find the answer eventually.

  Jesse was just as frustrated, but when he stopped by the pathology lab, Amanda wasn’t nearly as polite to him as she was to Mark.

  “If you come in here again, the next autopsy I perform will be on you,” she said.

  Jesse took the subtle hint and stayed clear of the lab after that, even when he had a justifiable reason to be there. On those occasions, he sent Susan instead, assuming that she would do her wifely duty and snoop while she was there.

  But Susan respected Amanda’s boundaries and didn’t venture a single question about the status of the Hoffman autopsy. She simply picked up whatever test results she was after, traded a few niceties, and left Amanda alone.

  “Would it have killed you to snoop just a little bit?” Jesse scolded Susan after one of her legitimate forays to the pathology lab.

  “I’m not the snooping type,” Susan said. “When Amanda has something to say, she’ll tell us. You have to be patient.”

  “So how come you don’t practice that same patience with me?” Jesse said. “How come you’re always asking me what I feel about everything?”

  “That’s different,” Susan said. “She’s performing an autopsy. I’m working on a marriage.”

  “It’s the same thing,” Jesse said, then scooted away to perform rounds before Susan could swat him.

  Mark and Jesse happened to be meeting in the cafeteria for lunch, two days after Ken Hoffman’s death, when Amanda paged them both.

  They went down to the pathology lab, and this time Amanda greeted them with a look of satisfaction on her face. She’d solved the mystery.

  “Do you know how he died?” Jesse asked, even though it was obvious that she did.

  She nodded. “And you’re not going to believe it.”

  “Tell me,” Mark said.

  “Not so fast,” she said. “This was hard work and I want to enjoy the moment.”

  She started at the beginning, explaining each step of her investigation.

  It drove Jesse nuts, but Mark was fascinated. Being a detective himself, he knew the pleasure of walking others through the clues before revealing his solution. He was the last person who was going to deprive Amanda of the same pleasure.

  The upshot was that Amanda found viral antibodies in Hoffman’s blood, lung tissue, brain tissue, and spinal fluid, which meant that whatever virus he had afflicted both his lungs and his central nervous system. And she’d managed to track that virus down.

  “It was West Nile virus,” she said.

  That was the last thing Mark would ever have guessed, but now that he thought about the symptoms, it made some sense. West Nile virus was passed by mosquito bites and could, in extreme cases, cause encephalitis, paralysis, respiratory failure, and death.

  Even so, it was hard news to accept. And Jesse couldn’t. He shook his head and held up his hands in front of his chest as if holding the news back.

  “Wait a minute,” Jesse said. “You’re telling me that an infected mosquito got into this hospital and bit the guy?”

  “No,” Amanda said. “West Nile doesn’t incubate that fast. He must have been bitten before his transplant.”

  “Talk about bad luck,” Jesse said.

  But another chilling explanation occurred to Mark.

  What if Corinne Adams was the one infected with West Nile? What if she’d passed it on to Ken Hoffman with her heart and lungs?

  If that was what had happened, they were facing a major catastrophe. Her organs and tissues had been implanted in at least five other people, perhaps more by now.

  Ken Hoffman’s death would be only the first of many.

  Mark was almost afraid to bring it up. “What if he wasn’t bitten by a mosquito? What if he contracted the virus from the organ transplant?”

  Amanda gave Mark a scolding look. “Do you think if that’s how Ken Hoffman was infected that we’d be having this calm discussion right now? I’d be in crisis mode, calling every hospital that received her organs, the company that dispersed her bones and tissues, as well as the NIH, the CDC, and the PTL.”

  “Why would you call the Praise the Lord network?” Jesse asked.

  “Because we’d need every prayer we could get,” Amanda said. “As soon as I discovered the West Nile virus antibodies in Hoffman, I went back and checked the tissue and blood samples from Corinne Adams. I didn’t find any trace of West Nile antibodies.”

  Unique antibodies are created by the body to defend against specific bacteria and viruses. If there weren’t any West Nile virus antibodies in Corinne Adams’s tissues or blood, it meant she wasn’t fighting the disease when she died.

  “Did Hoffman receive any blood transfusions?” Mark asked, remembering a case a few years earlier in which a dozen people were infected by West Nile-tainted blood.

  She shook her head. “We’re in the clear there, too.”

  “Which means Hoffman was infected on his own,” Mark said, sighing with relief.

  “The virus thrived, flaring up faster and deadlier than usual because of the anti-rejection drugs he was taking,” Amanda said.

  Only twenty percent of people infected with West Nile virus ever developed any symptoms, and even for them it was usually mistaken for a bad cold or flu. Just one percent of those infected with the virus suffered its most severe consequences. But Mark knew that organ transplant patients had a forty percent greater risk of developing serious illness from West Nile than anyone else, though the odds of their contracting it were astronomical.

  Ken Hoffman was the exception.

  “The poor guy. He was dead whether he got the transplant or not,” Jesse said. “He never had a chance.”

  It was true.

  If Hoffman hadn’t received the transplant, he would have died from the atrial septal defect that doomed his own heart and lungs to fail. But because of the transplant, he died of a mosquito bite instead.

  Fate.

  It seemed to be stalking Mark Sloan lately. He hoped that didn’t mean that they’d be meeting soon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Amanda immediately notified the Los Angeles County Health Department of Ken Hoffman’s death from West Nile virus. The LACHD informed the Greater Los Angeles County Vector Control District, the agency charged with wiping out disease-carrying insects and vermin. Within an hour of Amanda’s alert, Vector Control’s top man, Officer Lloyd Flegner, was on the case.

  The bloodsuckers never had a chance.

  Flegner was a retired LAPD detective who had spent twenty-five unremarkable years on the force, serving and protecting in virtual anonymity. So he gladly took his pension and went to work for Vector Control, where he put his unappreciated detecting skills to use finding mosquitoes, mice, bats, and rats and eradicating them.

  To his awed colleagues at Vector Control, he was Columbo, Monk, and Gil Grissom all rolled into an authentic Members Only jacket, khaki cargo pants, and mud-caked Doc Martens. Flegner had an almost preternatural ability to read rat droppings. With one glance at a trail of excrement, he could assess the number of rats in the area, where they were hiding, and how long they’d been there.

  If only the city’s rapists, thieves, and murderers defecated constantly like rats did, Flegner’s LAPD career might have been astonishing. He probably would have been chief of police by now.

  His abilities also extended to mosquito tracking and abatement. Even in his off-duty hours, he liked to prowl roadside ditches, flood channels, and stagnant ponds, laying mosquito traps and looking for larvae.

  He was the perfect man to investigate the Hoffman case. His first stop was the Hoffman residence in Topanga Canyon to interview the grieving family about their movements in the week preceding the victim’s admission to Community General Hospital. He needed to zero in on where Hoffman might have been attacked by that virus-carrying mosquito.

  He learned
that Hoffman, because of his deteriorating physical condition, rarely left their modest bungalow. And when he did go out, it was only for short walks in their secluded, woodsy neighborhood.

  That made Flegner’s job a lot easier. The viral hot spot was likely nearby.

  So Flegner took a walk down along the narrow, badly paved road outside the Hoffmans’ 1940s-era home. It was like discovering a lost civilization in a hidden valley.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, Topanga Canyon was favored by hippies, poets, actors, lesbians, and folksingers. Flegner could see that some of those liberal, free-loving, pot-smoking, creative types still lived there, surrounded by a cloud of incense and the tinkle of wind chimes. He knew because he could see their droppings—the faded Clinton/Gore bumper stickers on their cars, the Trader Joe’s grocery bags in their trash, the yellowed issues of Rolling Stone in their recycle bins.

  But it wasn’t the signs of survivors of a bygone era that Flegner was searching for. He was interested in standing water where mosquitoes could breed—empty pools and hot tubs, stagnant birdbaths, dormant fountains, and clogged catch basins. He found plenty of those and took samples from the puddles of green water for analysis.

  Flegner was on his way back to his Vector Control vehicle, a decade-old Impala, to drop off his samples and grab some mosquito traps when he saw the dead bird. It was lying amidst a pile of leaves at the base of a tree.

  He squatted down and examined the bird. He didn’t know whether it was a mourning dove, a condor, or a baby pterodactyl. He wasn’t an ornithologist; he was an ex-cop. He might not know a lot about birds, but he knew a thing or two about death.

  Whatever killed this bird did it from the inside.

  He knew something else, too.

  Birds start dying of West Nile virus before people do.

  Flegner put on a pair of rubber gloves, picked up the decomposing bird, and placed it in a plastic bag, which he dutifully labeled with the date, time, and location where it was found.

  He wouldn’t wait for the lab results before acting on his instinct. In the morning, he would order his troops to bug-bomb the entire neighborhood.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Teeg Cantrell had given up any pretense of defiance. Either he’d resigned himself to his bleak future or he’d weakened under the hypnotic power of McDonald’s Extra Value Meals. As long as Steve kept the chicken nuggets, Big Macs, and hot apple turnovers coming to the interrogation room, Teeg was happy to talk, describing in detail his various transactions with Gaylord Yokley.

  Kirby Kirkland, Teeg’s young, inexperienced public defender, was left with nothing to do but draw caricatures of celebrities in the style of Simpsons characters on his yellow legal pad. Steve thought Kirby had a brighter future as an artist than a lawyer.

  “How did your gang get into the gun business with Yokley?” Steve asked, finally getting around to a question he probably should have started with.

  “This homey who got out of Sunrise after doing a dime. He has a lot of juice, knew all about Yokley, said this dude could get us all the quetes we wanted,” Teeg said. “If this homey hadn’t stood up for Yokley, there was no way we would’ve been doing business in the burbs with some gringo.”

  Steve was amused when Teeg self-consciously peppered his speech with Spanish to give himself more street credibility. He wondered how that played for him outside of interrogation rooms.

  But he got Teeg’s point. The gang wouldn’t have been talking to some white guy at all if it wasn’t for the respected homey’s recommendation. Steve knew better than to ask Teeg who the homey was. Ratting out Yokley was fine. No one was going to hold that against Teeg. Ratting out a homey, though, would get Teeg killed.

  It wouldn’t be too hard for Steve to figure out which one of Teeg’s buddies had spent ten years at Sunrise.

  Which was Carter Sweeney’s home.

  Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have meant anything. Almost all the killers that Steve and his father had put away were spending their miserable lives at Sunrise. But given Yokley’s ties to ROAR, and Sweeney’s recent meeting with Mark, Steve couldn’t ignore the connection.

  “Have you ever heard your homey mention Carter Sweeney or ROAR?” Steve asked.

  “I’m not talking about my homeys,” Teeg said, slurping on a McDonald’s shake.

  “Okay,” Steve said. “Did you ever hear Yokley mention them?”

  “We weren’t homeys, you know? We didn’t kick it together.”

  “You never talked about anything besides guns?”

  “We talked about Mariah Carey and Beyonce’s asses,” Teeg said. “Or maybe it was J-Lo’s. Like which one was better, you know? And he’s the one who told me about LaShonda.”

  “He knew LaShonda?”

  “He knew how she was disrespecting me to my gente,” Teeg said, color rising in his face.

  “You mean by asking you for money to help raise your niños?” Steve said, tired of the Spanish shtick.

  “How do you know they’re mine? Yokley says she’s been stepping out with those pinchi putos from the barrio the whole time I was with her.”

  Steve didn’t see how a white racist in Palmdale could pick up street gossip like that or why he would pass it on to Teeg.

  “When did Yokley tell you this?”

  “The day that somebody took a shot at the bitch,” Teeg said.

  “That was you, Teeg.”

  “You don’t know that,” Teeg said, elbowing his lawyer.

  “Actually, I do,” Steve said.

  “That’s true,” Kirby Kirkland said.

  Steve noticed that the latest Simpsons character on the legal pad looked a lot like him. He wasn’t sure whether to be offended or flattered.

  “What kind of lawyer are you?” Teeg protested.

  “The police have got you for this, no question about it,” Kirby said. “The best we can hope for is a few good words to the judge from the prosecution on your behalf when it comes to sentencing and where you do your time. That’s the reason we’re cooperating.”

  At that moment the door opened and Tony Sisk strode boldly into the room, as if his entrance had been preceded by an orchestral fanfare. He wore his trademark double-breasted suit and, incongruously, enough bling to hold his own with any rapper.

  Sisk was familiar to everyone in the room and anyone who’d watched Court TV. He was one of LA’s more flamboyant and expensive criminal defense attorneys.

  “Do not say another word, Mr. Cantrell,” Sisk said, then pointed a finger accusingly at Kirby, which was pretty amazing, considering the heavy ring that was around his manicured digit. “This pitiful accident of human evolution is a servant for the jackals who’ve unjustly imprisoned you.”

  “Huh?” Teeg said.

  Kirby was completely flustered in the face of Sisk’s gale-force personality.

  Sisk sighed, disappointed that his flowery oratory had been wasted on his new client. “This public defender isn’t defending your interests. I will.”

  “You will?” Teeg’s eyes widened in shock. “But I can’t afford you.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” Sisk said. “Your good friend Gaylord Yokley is paying me.”

  “Why would he do that?” Teeg asked.

  “Because he despises injustice and cruelty, Mr. Cantrell, as do I.”

  As much as Steve disliked Sisk’s clients, he couldn’t bring himself to dislike the man himself. He enjoyed Sisk’s ridiculous bluster, even when it was directed at him.

  “Isn’t it obvious, Teeg? Yokley wants to shut you up before you can do him any more damage,” Steve said. “The only interests he’s looking out for are his own.”

  “He told me about LaShonda,” Teeg said.

  “And look where it’s gotten you,” Steve said.

  “Mr. Yokley had nothing to do with your unlawful, disgraceful, and unconscionable detention,” Sisk said, and then pointed his bejeweled finger at Steve. “Are you going to take the word of this sock-puppet of the ruling int
elligentsia or are you going to listen to me, a man you know to be a champion of the oppressed? It’s up to you, Mr. Cantrell.”

  Teeg turned to Kirby. “You’re fired.”

  Kirby looked almost relieved. Sisk smiled victoriously and waved Steve and Kirby out of the room.

  “Go throw yourselves on the mercy of your masters,” Sisk said. “I need to speak in private with my very important client.”

  Steve and Kirby left the room without a word. Out in the hall, Steve turned to the public defender, who seemed to be in a mild state of shock.

  “Do you think I could fit ‘sock-puppet of the ruling intelligentsia’ on a business card?” Steve asked. “It sounds a lot more impressive than ‘lieutenant.’ ”

  “If Sisk gets Yokley and Cantrell acquitted,” Kirby said, “you’ll have the chance to find out.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Ken Hoffman’s death from West Nile virus was the lead story on every local eleven o’clock news program and was even mentioned on CNN, Fox News, and most of the national newscasts. Mark figured it probably made the BBC and Al Jazeera, too.

  It was a story no news director could resist. A man undergoes a heart-lung transplant, the operation is a success, but he dies from a common mosquito bite.

  And wherever the story was told, one fact was sure to be mentioned: The man died at Community General Hospital.

  The death was a tragedy and no one’s fault, but Mark was sure that Janet Dorcott wouldn’t see it that way. Once again, Community General was getting negative press and Mark was involved. It didn’t matter than his involvement was tangential at best and that his name never came up in the news reports. He would still get nailed for it.

  So be it.

  Mark was switching off the TV when Steve came in, exhausted.

  “Alone tonight?” Mark asked.

  “Yeah,” Steve said. “Relieved?”

  Mark shrugged. “Just curious.”