Forbidden Birth

by William Rubin

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Well, do you have or did you ever get any of this Boxin into your store?”

  “No. As a pharmacist I would have no use for—well, wait. Come to think of it, I did receive samples from time to time to test the toxin’s efficacy and safety upon reconstitution. My consulting work with Granall involves some quality assurance work, you see. But that testing takes place only every three months, and I can’t see how that is relevant—”

  “—So you’d have records of any Boxin that came into the store that way, Gerry?”

  “Uh…well, no. Granall kept those records. You’d have to speak with them,” Buehler said with caution as he leaned back away from me.

  “I see…well, I’ll be sure to do that, Gerry. Kennedy or I will call you at the store for the contact person at Granall. That about wraps it up for this evening. No need to get up. I can let myself out.”

  As I rose from the table and walked towards the door. I couldn’t help but think I would be talking to Gerry Buehler again real soon. The Boxin connection was the kind of coincidence I would take seriously no matter what Granall told me.

  Chapter 50

  Kennedy and I finished the last of the glazed donuts and coffee and swiveled our chairs 180 degrees towards the suspect board. There was a lot on it, very little of it meshed.

  The newspapers, the The Daily in particular, had run with the story of a degenerate murderer killing pregnant women and their babies. They spread fact and fiction on the case with equal glee, enjoying the nice bump up in sales that went with coverage of such a heinous series of crimes. All the publicity surrounding the case had a spillover effect on us. It led to an unrelenting barrage of calls from well-meaning citizens intent on providing us useful leads on the case. It was so bad Chief of Detectives Ray Petersen had to assign three officers just to man the phones. Between that and the need to have every lead, no matter how ludicrous it seemed, fully investigated, we were facing a real shortage of manpower. Even the FBI, with their seemingly endless resources, was feeling the strain.

  I looked at the board for a few minutes. It was a mishmash of multicolored arrows indicating questionable connections between suspects and events. I then turned to Kennedy and nodded towards the board. “What do you think?”

  “Don’t know. At the heart of it we got three women and their babies, all dead. We got some legitimate suspects; Dietz, Briganti, Kimball, and Buehler, though none of them seem to tie to any more than one of the victims. We also got a bunch of lesser guys we’re checking out who might turn out to be legitimate suspects if we ever get the manpower to look into them. There’s the postman who had the hots for Rakel Ingi and who lived not far from Cassidy in the Bronx. There’s the electric meter guy from Con Edison who Cassidy thought was cheating her. He has a couple of complaints against him for harassing customers. But he doesn’t seem connected to Ingi in any way. Then there’s whoever ran the sex slave ring in Taiwan that Lin was a part of, not to mention all the johns who did her on a regular basis. Were you able to get anywhere on that front, Chris?”

  “’Fraid not, Kev. Taiwanese law enforcement couldn’t be bothered sharing with us. Bottom line gut feeling on all this, Kev?”

  “Bottom line is there is no bottom line. Who knows what’s fact and what’s fiction?” Kennedy said with frustration. “Shit. This is a fuckin’ mess.”

  I commiserated with Kennedy, completely in tune with how frustrated he was feeling.

  “Yeah, and to top it off, we got Kelly, Blumenthal, and Spatick breathing down our necks…”

  “…to make a bust, yesterday, if possible.”

  “Yup.”

  “You’re the smart one, doc. I’m just a lowly NYPD detective with ruggedly good looks and a body women would die for,” Kennedy said with his booming laugh before turning serious again a few moments later. “Christ, what the hell are we gonna do, Chris?”

  I stared back at my partner, speechless for the first time in years and feeling very old, very tired. On top of everything else going on, Commissioner Kelly had pulled me aside earlier, putting the screws on me to wrap things up quickly—as if it were that simple! And Dad had called me too. He was at his doctor’s office getting tests run for an irregular heartbeat he had just developed. How many different directions could a guy get pulled before he snaps? I thought to myself. I’d be worried about having another attack if I wasn’t feeling so disgusted with myself and so inadequate as a detective. I mumbled as I turned away and shook my head, “Don’t know, Kev. I just don’t freakin’ know.”

  Chapter 51

  Ah, the poor fools had such a rudimentary understanding of how it worked. Some scientists thought telomeres, segments of DNA on the ends of human chromosomes, were what controlled it. Others thought it was all about disorganization in tightly packed bundles of DNA called heterochromatin. Still others thought in grander terms than at the cellular level. They postulated that the endocrine system, the part of the body that produces and regulates hormones, was in charge of it.

  They were all wrong—as usual.

  The Giver had painstakingly figured it all out. He knew what caused aging in human beings. And he knew exactly how to control it.

  Exactly.

  The Giver could take a fetus, run it through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. He could turn that fetus into an old man or woman, make it suffer the ravages of aging, bring it to within a whisper of death...and then undo it all.

  Not that it was easy. No, it was exceedingly difficult to manipulate how the human body aged. It took a great deal of resources, knowledge, and effort—all of which The Giver now had in abundance, thanks to The Fertility Institute’s raging success. Teeming with self-pay patients, the clinic generated millions of dollars a year in cash for The Giver. That money in turn bought him everything he needed for his cloning/aging research: high tech equipment and supplies, and the best and brightest workers. It was also fueling his expansion. After months of careful, painstaking planning The Giver would soon be ready to open up a west coast office.

  The Giver was adept at creating clones of individual organs. Cloning organs was quite a feat and allowed for replacement of diseased tissue with genetically identical healthy tissue. It was important research that he continued to carry out and refine. But as important as that breakthrough was, it paled in comparison to his other efforts. Cloning organs had limited utility. Cloning an entire human being and controlling aging provided limitless possibilities.

  How did he do it? First, The Giver took the cell sample from a victim and created a clone composed of just four cells. Much of the work had utilized stem cells derived from fetuses, but that would soon change. The Giver was perfecting a technique that allowed him to use hair and skin samples from adult victims instead of just fetal stem cells. The Giver injected the multicellular clone with micro-doses, 1.5 nanoliters to be exact, of what he called Serum A3Z into those cells so they would rapidly replicate and differentiate into a healthy fetus. At this point, other techniques and serums, such as Serum B9X2 and his personal favorite, Serum C44R9, were employed to appropriately age the clone.

  It had taken The Giver four long years of trial and error to create his first adult clone. At that rate, The Giver's plans would have gone nowhere. But through sheer force of will, four years became sixteen months, which became nine, and then finally five. A great improvement, yes, but still nowhere near what he desired.

  Then, as with many scientific breakthroughs, it happened by accident. The Giver, exhausted by twenty-eight straight hours in the lab, inadvertently mixed two compounds together that should have been used four steps and nearly three months apart. The resulting compound, tweaked a few times since then, dramatically shortened the process.

  God created the heavens and earth in but six days. The Giver was closing in on him fast. His adult clones now took only sixty-six days to create.

  Chapter 52

  Monday morning I woke up before the sun, showered and dressed in silence, kissed
Michelle as she slept, and headed to the precinct. Kennedy and I had a lot to plow through on Dietz. After a relaxing break yesterday with Michelle, the kids, and Dad, I was itching to get the best jump on the case I could.

  By 7:00 a.m. I had already delved into everything we had on Dietz and turned up nothing new.

  As Kennedy arrived at the precinct around twenty minutes later, I smiled to myself. Kennedy was not only my best friend, but next to my dad, the person I most admired and respected. Kev had been through senseless tragedies that would have flattened lesser men, yet he continued to plow forward. He was determined to make the most of his life and to help others do the same. His kid sister, Samantha, died in his arms when she was sixteen, the victim of a hit and run driver who plowed into Kennedy’s car while he was giving Samantha her first driving lesson. They never found the scumbag who killed her. Then, in his late twenties, Kennedy was dealt another crippling blow. He had been dating Rebecca Flynn, a spunky Irish woman he met on the body building circuit. Kennedy opened up to her like he never had to any other woman. She got him, and they were madly in love, inseparable. Two weeks after Rebecca accepted Kennedy’s proposal of marriage she was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer. She never had a chance. Her once sculpted body withered away as Kennedy kept vigil with her. She died three months later. The Rock of Gibraltar was like a sand castle compared to my buddy Kennedy.

  “How ya doing, Chris? Got an early start, huh?” Kennedy said as he plopped a Dunkin Donuts bag down in between the tall, neat stacks of reports that covered almost his entire desk.

  “Yeah. Couldn’t sleep. Figured I’d outline what we need to get on Dietz today,” I said as I looked up from the mound of files and reports I had been looking through.

  Kennedy settled into his desk, pulled the tab off his coffee, and blew some steam away as it radiated through the opening. “Okay. Fire away, big guy.”

  Looking down at the legal pad in front of me, I tore four pages from it and handed them to Kennedy, who scanned the list before replying. “Glad I hit the gym already.… Looks like it’s going to be a long day.”

  “Yeah, we better get cracking right away. No telling how long this research will take, and I don’t feel comfortable delegating any of it—there’s too much at stake.”

  “You got that right.

  “Agent King in the loop on all this?” Kennedy asked with curiosity.

  “Yeah. I’m keeping that bigoted fat bastard as up to date as possible. I figure that way it will keep him out of our hair,” I said as I cradled the phone on my shoulder and began to make the first of many calls.

  The OR nurses were a good place to start, they opened for business around 7:30 a.m. each day.

  §

  By early Friday afternoon Kennedy and I had worked through the entire list on Dietz. We spoke with just about everyone we needed to and had word back from every professional organization Dietz had ever been a member of. Mostly we came up negative, though we were still waiting for word back from OPMC, the Office of Professional Medical Conduct, and MLMIC, Dietz’s malpractice carrier.

  Dietz was in good standing with all the local, state, and national medical societies. No complaints had ever been filed against him. Likewise, there were no marks against him at the hospitals or with the hospital staffs, unless you consider his status as the highest volume abortion doctor in the state a blight on his record. Dietz worked with a lot of indigent patients at MMC, many of whom used abortion as their primary means of birth control. Given his patient mix, we had no reason to be suspicious about the number of abortions he performed—not yet, anyway.

  Pharmaceutical and surgical reps didn’t provide us anything of interest either. They, along with everyone we interviewed from his residency program, said the same thing: Dietz was a nice guy and a competent physician. Some colleagues described Dietz as a loner and thought it was strange he was still in solo practice in an academic setting. OB/GYN’s often have partners or associates to lighten their demanding call schedules. Dietz had a few of these over the years; Doctors Thomas, Webster, Spielberg. We had calls out to each of them. Dietz’s colleagues didn’t understand how he could balance his academic responsibilities, a solo practice, and the demands of a busy career in research. That last comment struck me as quite odd.

  Dietz never mentioned anything to us about being involved in any research.

  Chapter 53

  I came up empty at Dietz’s private office. His secretary, Becky, directed me to the Jonas Aravind Clinical and Basic Sciences Research Building, indicating that’s where I could find Dietz when he wasn’t seeing his private patients and was not working with residents in the clinic or the OR.

  The Aravind Research Building was a gleaming steel and glass structure located in the heart of the MMC Campus. Completed in 1982 and renovated many times in the intervening thirty years, the building housed myriad research projects across all medical specialties. The pharmacy school, in addition to Manning Medical Center and Manning Medical School, made extensive use of the facilities.

  After traveling up to the third floor and following a labyrinth of hallways, I found Dietz’s lab, “Stem Cell and Embryologic Studies.” I wrapped my knuckles on the open door and waltzed with confidence into the lab.

  “Fancy meeting you here, doc,” I said casually but loud enough to draw Dietz’s attention from whatever he was working on under the microscope in front of him. A half-dozen other workers also looked up from their microscopes, perplexed by the intrusion.

  “Hello, Detective Ravello. What brings you here today?” Dietz said coolly.

  “A little birdie told me I’d find you here. Didn’t realize you were hot and heavy into research, Carl.”

  “Well now you do,…” Dietz said with obvious disdain as he stared at me while I approached him.

  “So…whatcha working on?” I said in my most upbeat and annoying voice as I pulled up beside Dietz and peered over his shoulder.

  “A novel way to replicate stem cell lines removed from the developing embryo, if you must know,” Dietz said curtly.

  “Oh I must, Carl. Knowing what everyone’s up to is what I do for a living. What do you say we continue this conversation in your office? I wouldn’t want to disturb any of your worker bees while they try to make medical history.”

  “That’s the first good idea you’ve had, Detective.” Dietz waved me towards his office.

  Dietz’s office was much larger than I expected, especially after visiting the cramped quarters of his private practice. As they had in that office, books dominated the wall behind Dietz’s desk. Here a certain elegance pervaded this part of the room. Black, shiny countertops jutted out of the wall behind him, holding two powerful CamScan 3000 electron microscopes with display cases full of microscope slides in between them. Along the left side of the wall, the elegance disappeared, giving way to a series of odd and disturbing objects right out of The Twilight Zone or Creepshow. Closest to me was a human forearm, eerily preserved and suspended from the ceiling by invisible strands. Next was a large, light brown globe. Its surface outlined all the landmasses as with any typical model of the earth, but it differed from other globes in one respect, the shell was transparent, allowing its bizarre contents, a human embryo suspended in some sort of turbid fluid, to shine through.

  Beyond the globe sat a double pyramid, one on top of the other. Their bases faced each other, and one pyramid rotated 180 degrees relative to the other. Sandwiched in between the two pyramids was a well-preserved, human eye encased in a clear gelatin. It stared menacingly at me. The right side of the room, also adorned with black countertop, was functional in nature. A gray fax machine sat in the middle of the countertop with large, flat screen computer monitors to each side of it.

  The room was so strange that for a few minutes it threw off my equilibrium and train of thought. My eyes and mind wandered as I took in the layout and the numerous pictures on the walls. Dietz was in all of the photos. A few caught him in mid-sentence, speaking with passion at
a podium. Two, familiar from his other office, had Dietz posed with colleagues while receiving awards. A lone photo, quite out of place with and larger than the others, showed Dietz holding up the catch of the day, a large bluefish suspended from his fishing line. Next to him was one of his colleagues, in a pose nearly identical to the other photo they shared. As in the other picture, the man had his right hand wrapped around Dietz’s shoulder. But this time his left hand, which held a beer aloft in celebration, obscured Dietz and his catch of the day. The man succeeded in his attempt to steal Dietz’s thunder.

  A question from Dietz roused me from my thoughts. “Huh, what did you say?” I responded.

  “I said, what is it you want, Detective? I am a busy man and don’t like to be pulled away from my work needlessly.”

  “Yes, well I can appreciate that, Doctor Dietz. In fact, it is this very work,” I said as I twisted back and pointed towards the lab, “that I want to talk to you about. I find it strange and unsettling that you didn’t mention it before.”

  “How so?” Dietz said dispassionately. “None of this seems relevant to a murder investigation.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that, Doctor. Stem cell research is a fascinating area, but one wrought with ethical dilemmas and the potential for misuse and abuse. That makes it quite relevant to a murder case, especially one in which unborn babies are missing.”

  Dietz stared at me, stewing in silence. His appearance, his manner, was quite different than when we spoke earlier at his private office. Gone today were the nerdy glasses, beaten up lab coat, and poor posture. In their place were contact lenses, colored to make his eyes blue, and a crisp, sparkling white coat that fit Dietz like a fine Italian suit. No longer hunched forward and indifferent to his surroundings, Dietz stretched out to his full height in his black leather chair, an air of confidence, of smugness even, surrounding him.