The Last Word

by Lee Goldberg

  “It isn’t serious between Olivia and me,” Steve said. “It’s just casual for now.”

  “Of course it is. I can’t remember the last time you had a serious relationship.”

  Steve flopped onto the couch across from Mark, who sat in his favorite leather reading chair, his feet up on the ottoman.

  “Fifth grade. Stacey O’Quinn. That was serious,” Steve said. “She broke my heart and I’ve never recovered.”

  “Whatever happened to her?”

  “It was thirty years ago,” Steve said. “How should I know?”

  “You’re a detective,” Mark said. “You could find out.”

  “God, how pathetic would that be?” Steve said.

  Mark studied his son for a long moment. Steve couldn’t meet his father’s gaze.

  “When did you find her?” Mark asked.

  Steve grimaced with embarrassment. “Last year. She’s living down in Costa Mesa with her second husband. She’s got two kids from her first marriage and one from her second. She’s a hairdresser.”

  “Sounds like you were better off without her,” Mark said. “How’s the Yokley case going?”

  “Nowhere since Teeg lawyered up,” Steve said.

  “Didn’t he have a lawyer already?”

  “He had a public defender,” Steve said. “Now he’s got Tony Sisk, who also happens to represent Gaylord Yokley.”

  Mark felt a shiver on the back of his neck. He was suddenly and instinctively aware of danger all around him, as if he were walking down a dark alley in a very bad neighborhood.

  “Those aren’t his only clients,” Mark said.

  “I know he also represents that basketball player who raped a cheerleader and that sitcom star who got caught buying crystal meth on skid row. He’s slumming with Yokley and Teeg.”

  “He’s also Carter Sweeney’s lawyer,” Mark said.

  Steve tensed up, undoubtedly feeling the same sense of danger that his father was.

  “Since when?”

  “I don’t know,” Mark said. “But Sisk is the one who called me with Sweeney’s request for a meeting.”

  This wasn’t good. Not at all.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Steve asked.

  “Carter Sweeney’s grand plan,” Mark said. “Whatever it is.”

  There was some ominous meaning behind these events, and whatever it was, Mark was sure it wasn’t good for him, Steve, or anybody else.

  “By getting his lawyer to represent Yokley and Teeg, Sweeney is virtually admitting to us that he’s behind the plot to provoke a gang war to create anarchy in LA,” Steve said. “Why would he want to do that?”

  “Ego?”

  “But he failed,” Steve said. “Why take credit for a failure?”

  “Perhaps to show us that even in prison he’s still a force to be reckoned with.”

  “If Sisk has been relaying orders to Yokley on Sweeney’s behalf in the furtherance of a criminal enterprise, we can arrest him.”

  “You’d have to prove it first,” Mark said. “And you have nothing to go on but your suspicions and mine. There isn’t a shred of actual evidence.”

  “So what do you suggest? That we should just be satisfied that we stopped Sweeney’s plot?”

  “What makes you think we’ve done that?” Mark asked.

  Steve filled Mark in on everything he’d learned from Teeg. Mark was especially intrigued by Yokley’s uncharacteristic tip to Teeg that his girlfriend was sleeping around with members of rival gangs. Did Yokley want to provoke the shooting? Or did Sweeney? And if so, why?

  Sleep didn’t come easily that night for Mark. He spent hours tossing and turning in bed, looking at the Yokley case from every angle, trying to discern the true shape of the plot and Carter Sweeney’s actual intentions.

  Was there more to it than stoking a gang war in the midst of a hotly contested mayoral election? Were anarchy and bloodshed Sweeney’s genuine goals or had he always intended for the scheme to be revealed before it could be executed? What did Sweeney gain in either scenario? And how did Sweeney’s meeting with Mark figure into all of this?

  Coming up with questions was easy. What Mark was woefully short on was answers. He couldn’t make everything that had happened fit into any kind of coherent strategy. Whatever Sweeney was up to, Mark simply couldn’t see it.

  And that scared him.

  He knew Sweeney was a patient man and that his plans often took years to come to fruition. Were these the first steps in a long-term stratagem or was it the endgame finally unfolding in all its complexity?

  But despite Mark’s fear, and the blizzard of questions clouding his mind, his body finally overruled his intellect and he fell asleep.

  The next morning he was no longer tormented by the questions and anxieties that had kept him up half the night. He was relaxed and letting his subconscious crunch the data.

  Mark met Amanda and Jesse for cinnamon rolls and coffee in the Community General pathology lab. Although being surrounded by corpses waiting to be autopsied and bodily fluids to be tested didn’t offer the warmest ambience for breakfast, Mark preferred it to running into Janet Dorcott in the hallways. He was tempted to hide here for the rest of the day.

  “You can’t avoid her forever,” Jesse said.

  “She’s going to find some way to blame me, you, and Amanda for the bad press Community General is getting over Hoffman’s death.”

  “Maybe not,” Amanda said. “I heard from Vector Control on my way in today. They found a dead bird in Hoffman’s neighborhood. It was infected with West Nile virus.”

  “That’s the final piece of the puzzle,” Mark said.

  “It’s also going to shift the media’s attention away from us and onto the major mosquito abatement offensive the county is mounting in Topanga Canyon,” Amanda said. “The county is spraying, removing sources of standing water, and doing whatever it is they do to kill mosquitoes. They’re also telling everyone who lives in Topanga Canyon to wear long sleeves, long pants, and slather themselves with insect repellent.”

  “The people who live out there aren’t going to be too happy about that,” Jesse said. “A lot of those Topanga people don’t even like to use deodorant.”

  “That whole hippie thing is a cliché,” Amanda said. “Have you looked at what houses cost in Topanga? There are a lot of very wealthy movie stars, studio executives, and TV producers living in the canyon now.”

  “Okay,” Jesse said. “Do you think they’re going to like wearing long sleeves and reeking of bug repellent?”

  “You have a point,” Mark said.

  “Community General isn’t going to be the story anymore,” Jesse said. “We can all relax.”

  The doors to the pathology lab swung open, and a dozen men and women marched in carrying computers, metal cases, and various pieces of medical testing equipment. They fanned out into the lab as if it belonged to them and began setting up their things. Before Amanda could say a word, a blond-haired man dressed entirely in black stepped forward, flashing his federal ID.

  So much for relaxing, Mark thought.

  “I’m Dr. Logan Sharpe with the Centers for Disease Control,” he said. “This is my crisis team. We’re going to be using this lab as our base of operations until the crisis is over.”

  “What crisis?” Amanda asked. “And what does it have to do with my pathology lab?”

  “Jackie Blain, Bill Cluverius, Paul Bishop, Joel Goldsmith, and Victoria Burrows.”

  “Who are they?” Amanda asked.

  “The people who received Corinne Adams’s two kidneys and three liver sections,” Jesse said, his voice heavy with dread.

  “Right you are, Dr. Travis. Three of them are dead from encephalitis, two are in comas. Would you like to guess why?”

  Mark thought he knew the answer. It sent a shiver of fear down his spine. The deadly catastrophe he’d envisioned the other day was coming true after all.

  “The organs from Corinne Adams were infected with We
st Nile virus,” Mark said.

  “You just won the grand prize, Dr. Sloan,” Sharpe said. “You get to be the middleman between my team and every other department in this hospital.”

  “How did you confirm it was WNV?” Amanda asked.

  “We autopsied the brains of the dead victims. The brain tissue tested positive for WNV by PCR and by flavivirus immunohistochemical staining,” Sharpe said. “The serum, plasma, and cerebrospinal fluid of the two comatose patients have all tested positive for WNV antibodies and RNA. We checked and double-checked the results.”

  Mark couldn’t fault the science or the conclusions.

  Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is used to find the virus itself in blood and tissues. Routine tests locate viruses by isolating the antibodies that the body creates to fight the virus. PCR replicates any ribonucleic acid (RNA) that a virus leaves behind and reveals its identity, much the same way that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) left at a crime scene can be used to positively identify the criminal.

  The immunohistochemical staining tags specific antibodies with a substance that makes the viruses glow under the electron microscope so they can be detected.

  “But the county found a bird infected with West Nile right outside Hoffman’s house in Topanga Canyon,” Jesse said.

  “It’s a meaningless coincidence,” Sharpe said, “but fortunate for the people who live in Topanga Canyon. Otherwise, WNV might not have been detected in their area until someone got infected.”

  “Someone did get infected,” Jesse said.

  “Corinne Adams didn’t live or work near Topanga Canyon,” Sharpe said. “So it’s irrelevant in this case if there’s a WNV hot spot there or not.”

  “This has to be a mistake. I’ve checked Corinne Adams’s blood and tissues twice,” Amanda said. “I can tell you with absolute certainty that there were no West Nile virus antibodies present.”

  “We’re going to recheck everything and consider every possibility,” Sharpe said. “And we’re going to do it fast, before a lot more people die.”

  “We need to recall all of the donor’s organs and tissues,” Amanda said. “I’ll get on the phone to MediSolutions International in Phoenix.”

  “We already have a team there, going through their records, tracking down every bone, tendon, fingernail, flake of skin, and lock of hair from her body. We also have people deployed to each hospital that received one of her donor organs. This is what we do, Dr. Bentley.”

  “Then what can I do?” Amanda asked.

  “A cup of coffee would be nice,” Sharpe said. “I take mine black.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Within an hour of the arrival of the CDC team, the entire hospital knew about the situation. And with the CDC chopper on the helipad atop Community General, it was only a matter of time before the press picked up on it, too.

  Nobody was more aware of this than Janet Dorcott, who hunted Mark down and confronted him outside the pathology lab after he’d been running around the hospital, gathering the files and test results on Adams and Hoffman that Sharpe needed. Her face resembled a storm cloud, dark and angry, crackling with electric fury.

  “Who is responsible for this?” she demanded, tipping her head towards the CDC team hard at work in the pathology lab.

  “No one is,” Mark said, balancing the heavy stack of files in his arms.

  “Then why did a team from the CDC fly in from Atlanta and invade our hospital?”

  “The organs harvested from Corinne Adams were infected with West Nile virus,” Mark said. “They’re looking for the cause.”

  “No, Dr. Sloan. They already know the cause. That’s not why they are here. They want to know how it happened. Someone on your team screwed up. Didn’t you test the donor for infectious diseases before the transplant?”

  “Of course we did,” Mark said, his own anger flaring now.

  “Then why didn’t West Nile come up?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “That’s one explanation,” she said. “The other is incompetence.”

  Mark wanted to slap her right across the face, but that would have meant dropping all the files. Instead, he lowered his voice and took a step closer to her. She held her ground.

  “West Nile virus is exceedingly rare. Organ donors aren’t routinely screened for it. Even if they were, the specific tests for the West Nile virus aren’t always accurate and can’t be completed in time for urgent transplant cases,” Mark said. “If Corinne Adams was infected and it wasn’t detected, it’s not negligence or incompetence. It’s bad luck.”

  “Bad luck seems to follow you and your close colleagues,” Janet said. “If I was a member of the general public, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be one of your patients and I certainly wouldn’t set foot in this hospital. In fact, I’d even think twice about driving near the building.”

  “If you feel so strongly about it,” Mark said, “maybe you shouldn’t be here.”

  “I’m not the one who should leave, Dr. Sloan. I strongly recommend that you consider our severance offer while it is still on the table,” she said. “And while you’re at it, you might also suggest to Dr. Bentley and Dr. Travis that they might be happier at other hospitals.”

  She turned and stomped off.

  Mark wouldn’t pass her suggestion along to Amanda or Jesse. He needed them focused on their work and not distracted by anger.

  It had been his experience that chief administrators came and went. It was only a matter of time before Janet Dorcott left, too. The question was whether he would still be working at Community General when she did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Grand Majestic was a grandiose name for a grandiose hotel, an Art Deco monument to money and decadence, erected in downtown Los Angeles before the Great Depression as a place where high society could delight in their altitude.

  But the market tumbled, and those who didn’t fall from their great heights gradually moved their never-ending party west to Hancock Park and Beverly Hills.

  The Victorian mansions they left behind on Bunker Hill were razed, and the hill itself was bulldozed, tunneled, and topped with office buildings.

  The Grand Majestic remained, stripped bare of its elegance, slowly eroding from the inside out over the years, its once luxurious suites rented out by the day, and then by the hour, and then when even that pitiful business couldn’t be sustained, abandoned altogether.

  The building became submerged in a Dickensian mire of law-suits and countersuits over ownership between banks, private investors, the city, and the historical society that lasted for decades. And while they fought, the Grand Majestic became a decaying, trash-strewn, urine-stenched shelter for junkies, whores, and drunks.

  Now the Grand Majestic was being gutted for renovation into a dozen two-million-dollar town houses for the wealthy young professionals that police chief and mayoral candidate John Masters hoped would be filling the two soaring office towers that investors from Dubai were building downtown.

  That’s why the chief was at the Grand Majestic construction site, mingling with the workers and trailed by photographers. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and he wore a pristine hard hat, as if he might abruptly decide to pound some rivets.

  Steve Sloan wondered if campaign protocol required that a candidate dress to blend in with whatever workplace he was visiting. If Masters made a campaign stop at a hospital, would he be expected to put on a lab coat so he could render a diagnosis? If he visited a university, would he be expected to lug a backpack full of textbooks around with him? It was ridiculous, but all politicians seemed to do it.

  Maybe Masters realized how ridiculous it was, too. It seemed as though the former pro football player would have been more comfortable charging through the crowd of people and tackling them rather than shaking their hands and gifting them with a pained smile.

  Masters wasn’t a people person. He liked to control people, not move among them.

  The chief toured the site, then gave a s
tump speech to the hundred or so construction workers on their lunch break about how the transformation of the Grand Majestic was symbolic of the rebirth of downtown. It was also indicative, he said, of the change he would bring as mayor to the most impoverished areas of the city. He promised to battle the blight of urban decay the way he’d battled crime. The weapons in his fight would be creating jobs by supporting more urban renewal projects. His dream, Masters said, was for Los Angeles “to truly be a City of Angels.”

  It was a catchy phrase, but Steve wasn’t sure what it meant. In order for LA to be a City of Angels, wouldn’t they all have to be dead? Wasn’t “City of Angels” just a fancy name for a ghost town?

  But the audience didn’t seem to share Steve’s confusion. They were stirred into enthusiastic applause, which Masters soaked up before retreating to his Lincoln Town Car and motioning Steve to join him.

  They were alone in the car, sitting side by side in the backseat, sheathed in privacy behind glass tinted almost as dark as the chief’s stony gaze. The chief locked the doors so they wouldn’t be disturbed.

  “I’ve been watching the Yokley case,” the chief said. “Not much is happening with it.”

  “It’s slow going,” Steve agreed. “Tracing the guns back to their sources is tedious and laborious. The serial numbers were removed from most of the weapons, but it appears some of them may have come from—”

  “I don’t care about the guns,” the chief said, interrupting Steve. “That’s the ATF’s problem. I’m interested in Carter Sweeney. You should be, too.”

  “I am.”

  “Then why haven’t I seen you following up on that?”

  “There isn’t anything to follow, sir.”

  Chief Masters grimaced. “Gaylord Yokley is aligned with ROAR, Sweeney’s personal army of clueless morons, and he’s represented by Tony Sisk, Sweeney’s lawyer, who arranged for your father and Sweeney to meet for some goddamn reason. All of which just happens to occur weeks before the mayoral election. And right before Sweeney goes to court to argue that he should be released from prison because his rights were trampled in a gross miscarriage of justice, which, he says, was orchestrated by me and Neal Burnside. And you don’t think there’s anything to follow? Sweeney is plotting something.”