Forbidden Birth

by William Rubin

“I did. Two things would prevent that. First, the Physof program can only be accessed via a computer that has the software. And none of Dietz’s staff members have the software on their home computers. But even if they did, their level of clearance, set by Dietz, does not allow them to change patient records outside of the office. They can only look at office notes in read only mode.”

  “I see. Well wouldn’t an expert hacker be able to bypass these restrictions?”

  “He would…if he had the software at home, which none of the staff do. The company that makes Physof puts an anti-piracy subroutine in the program. So if a staff member grabbed the software CD’s and tried to install it on their home computer, it wouldn’t work. The install is done by the company for certain computers. Nobody but the company can install the program elsewhere. It makes typical anti-piracy safeguards look like a joke.”

  I shook my head up and down, slow to digest everything Stippler said. “How about at the lab? Were the pages and pages of Dietz’s notes on the murders also imported?”

  “Absolutely. The lab uses a slightly different version of the Physof software, but the same rules apply…someone set Dietz up.”

  “The question is, who? Can you trace where the hacker was working from?” I asked.

  “Not very well. As I said before, the hacker pretty well hid his presence, and what traces there were just narrowed the activity down to somewhere in Manhattan.”

  “But you did get it narrowed down that far? It couldn’t be a computer in NJ or Connecticut or the Bronx?”

  “No. The little bit of IP address I could decipher told me it was in Manhattan.”

  “Thanks, Jason. I appreciate you going out on a limb for us.”

  “No problem. I can see your hunch was right. I just don’t know where you go from here,” Stippler said with a shrug as he stood up. He was about to throw a few bucks on the table before I put up the stop sign. “Keep me in the loop, Chris.”

  “Will do. Thanks again, Jason.”

  I sat there for another ten minutes, drinking a second cup of coffee and then a third. I’d need all the stimulation I could get to catch this tricky bastard.

  §

  My phone rang just as I was putting the finishing touches on my third cup of Joe and staring out the window at a passing train.

  My mind was racing as I answered. “Ravello here,” I said authoritatively and a little louder than I intended. A few people turned and looked at me.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you, Detective,” Audrey McGowan said thoughtfully.

  “No. Not at all,” I said much quieter this time. “With two young children, sleeping till 7:00 a.m. is a forgotten luxury. What do you have for me, Doc?”

  “Nothing conclusive, I’m afraid. Cross-referencing the fingerprints and DNA databases you provided me with and the evidence from the murders yielded eight possible matches. I have to caution you, though, the partial print and damaged DNA we have allow for just possible matches. We cannot with certainty rule in any of these people and none of this would hold up on cross-examination in a court-room.”

  “Understood, Doctor. Who’s on our short list?” I said, a glimmer of excitement and hope spilling into my voice as I took out my notebook and a pen. I really appreciated McGowan sticking her neck out and assisting us in our covert investigation.

  “Smetha Banerjee, Carl Sunman, Frederic Watkins, Leopold Cohen, Sasha Sjackovic, Dennis O’Leary, Tsukemoto Matsui, and Ralph Cassella.”

  “It’s quite a diverse group, Doctor. Sounds like a United Nations delegation or subcommittee. Do any of them live or work in Manhattan?” I asked in a casual manner.

  “I’ll check…. Why yes, all but two of them either live or work in Manhattan. Watkins lives and works in the Bronx, and Cassella hails from New Jersey and works in Orange County. Is that helpful, Detective?”

  “Quite helpful,” I said as I mulled the names over, searching my brain for any familiarity with the six remaining ones. I found none.

  “Will there be anything else, Detective?” McGowan replied.

  “Uh, no. That should do it for now.” After thanking her and wishing her a premature happy 4th of July, I left the diner and started down Scarsdale Avenue. I walked away from the Tudor buildings that housed the upscale shops of downtown Scarsdale and headed towards a favorite haunt of mine, Millennio. The restaurant was small, the food great, and the staff attentive. I strolled by its entrance—a stone staircase flanked on each side by statues of lions. I was hoping the fresh air and a brisk walk would clear my head. They didn’t.

  We had a list of six doctors culled from the thousands of Physof tri-state users. That was the good news. The bad news was that another hundred and fifty users were OB’s or stem cell researchers without any DNA or fingerprints on file. All of them were potential suspects too.

  After pacing back and forth a few times, I sat on the steps in front of Millennio. I was churning the case over in my mind in great detail when an elderly couple passing by broke my concentration. The man wore an American Legion cap with a small American Flag pinned on it. They smiled back at me, somewhat perplexed, I’m sure, about my sitting on the steps of a restaurant that wouldn’t open for nine hours. As they disappeared off in the distance, I decided on the next step in the investigation. Kennedy and I would check the hundred and fifty users’ work and home addresses and do complete background checks on the ones who either lived or worked in Manhattan. That would narrow the list further.

  Annoyed that time was running short and there wasn’t anything else we could do, I got up from the stairs and jogged quickly back to the Firebird, my frustration mounting with each passing step.

  As I hopped in the car, the maddening truth about the case washed over me; after all this time and effort, I still didn’t have a feel for who this nutjob was. He—or she—danced tantalizingly close, yet off in the shadows and beyond my reach.

  Chapter 72

  Back at Kennedy’s I tore through the list of suspects we had. The “original eight” as I now referred to McGowan’s list, was down to four names. Banerjee was in Jacksonville, Florida during two of the murders and Leopold Cohen had been in Vienna the last three and a half weeks for his annual opera sojourn. That left Carl Sunman, Sasha Sjackovic, Dennis O’Leary, and Tsukemoto Matsui. I employed any and all manner of background checks on the four. For most of the checks, including DMV, credit, and NY, NJ, CT criminal checks, my clearance was sufficient to conduct the searches on my own. Some other information was in the public domain, such as when I examined court records for any mention of the four as plaintiffs or defendants in civil actions. Still other searches required an assist from Stippler, who was able to provide me access to CIA and FBI databases. Finally, I consulted with local, state, and federal medical society databases, and state boards of medical conduct. There were no irregularities.

  Around eleven Kennedy returned, also with little to report. We headed down the hallway to a converted bedroom that he used as a home office and where I had been busy doing my research on our new list of suspects. I powered up his Toshiba laptop. Between the laptop and his IBM desktop, we applied the same checks to the list of one hundred and fifty doctors without DNA or fingerprint samples. We eliminated those people who didn’t live or work in Manhattan or who came up clean on all the searches. The list shrunk to eighty-four names. We scanned their payroll tabulations, obtained by hacking into payroll files of the doctors’ employers. Anyone verifiably out of the tri-state area or working shifts when the murders happened, was pulled off the list. The group decreased by a quarter to sixty-two suspects. We then used a very scientific method to evaluate the names further. We each took our respective half of the list and stared at it, waiting for something to jump out. It never did.

  At one-thirty we took a short break for lunch, chowing down in Kennedy’s small eat-in-kitchen on pizza layered with pepperoni, red peppers, and salami. I had to hand it to Kennedy, for an Irishman, he could handle Italian food with the best of them. The lone topping he s
teered clear of as did most of my paesanos: anchovies. After we polished off the small pie, we trudged back down the hall and resumed our work.

  We switched lists and continued staring at the names. Kennedy rubbed the green Buddha’s belly that he brought in from the living room, which he kept around as a conversation piece for his dates. I drank my cream soda and scratched my head, feet propped up on the small desk that housed Kennedy’s desktop computer. Time moved oh so slowly as both of us looked over the lists again and again. A couple of the names did look familiar, though I wasn’t sure where I’d seen them or if desperation was motivating me to see mirages.

  The first was Louis Antes, a prominent NYC fertility specialist, who I soon realized helped two friends of ours from Greenwich conceive. Nothing unusual came up on him.

  The second of the three familiar names was a Frenchman. He was tops in his field of stem cell research. A Pub Med search showed no less than twenty-five publications by him over the last six years, all in major journals such as The Journal of Stem Cell Research, The American Journal of Bioethics, and The New England Journal of Medicine. I scanned the abstracts on his publications. The science was daunting. Just six years removed from my med school training, I found many of the terms and techniques as fascinating as they were foreign to me. The fourth article sent my antennas up. Titled, Novel Techniques for In Vitro Oocyte/Somatic Cell Nuclear Fusion, its two lead authors were Carl Dietz and Jean Louise Durand.

  Perhaps after all this time we were on to something.

  §

  Dietz and Durand had coauthored nine papers together, which was not so surprising given that they were both prominent in their field, and both lived and worked in close proximity. Both had also coauthored with dozens of other physicians—just none of them on our list of sixty-six.

  Their papers were all published between 2012 and 2013. During that time the two had published almost exclusively with each other. Their papers were some of the most influential ever in the fields of stem cell research and cloning. Then in 2014, the collaborations ended. Had there been a falling out between the two?

  A Google images search showed both men side by side, Durand’s hand on Dietz’s shoulder as Dietz received an award. It was the very same photo I saw hanging in Dietz’s office as I waited to interview him for the first time.

  Was this what I had been searching for?

  I plowed ahead, my mind racing far faster than my fingers could. My heart pounded in my chest as I searched for other connections between the two men. Within minutes I found them. Durand and Dietz had attended, and even spoken at, many of the same conferences. They also sat on some of the same OB/GYN committees that oversaw stem cell research and espoused medical and ethical guidelines to follow in carrying out that research. All these connections fortified my confidence, but I needed much more than that to—

  THERE IT WAS!

  A 2013 The Daily expose on Durand. The main source quoted in the researcher-bashing article? Carl Dietz. Dietz characterized Durand as “totally amoral…and not much of a scientist either,” and suggested “controversy and condemnation were the hallmarks of Durand’s career before he met me. Joining forces with a well-respected member of the medical community, such as myself, helped Durand to move past the allegations of impropriety that haunted him. In 2012 and most of 2013 Durand was moving beyond his ‘bad boy’ image and garnering the praise and respect of colleagues who had once disdained him.” Dietz didn’t indicate what led him to go public with his criticisms, just that, “it was the same type of behavior that had plagued Durand earlier…I thought he had changed for the better, but I was wrong.”

  The Daily article was motive enough for Durand to set Dietz up for a fall, but it was only the beginning. A local TV investigative reporter, Harry Rodriguez, ran with the story, lambasting Durand on the six o’clock news in early 2014. Rodriguez aired interviews with doctors who had worked with Durand during his residency. The physicians, protected by voice modulating technology and seated in complete darkness across from Rodriguez, all said the same thing: Durand had allegedly abused a number of patients and was pulled off the wards and reassigned to research duties for the remainder of his residency. The residency was then cut short after Durand violated the hospital’s policy by carrying out experiments in which he grew fetuses from fused human/mouse eggs and genetically altered sperm.

  The Rodriguez piece then filled viewers in on the years between Durand’s aborted residency and his opening of The Fertility Institute. For two years Durand bounced from one research facility to another in the greater Boston area amid “moral character questions.”

  Both stories created quite a stir when they broke, but as with all stories in the city that never sleeps, they died as the media rode the crest of the next great news stories.

  But the damage had been done. Durand had been exposed, humiliated. He had motive to go after Dietz. We finally had our killer.

  “Kev, Jean Louise Durand is our man. Check this out.…”

  “Holy shit!” was all Kennedy could say as I showed him the picture and explained the background. “We got the guy, Chris! Great work, buddy,” Kennedy said as we high-fived, low-fived, and tapped closed-fisted knuckles together. Kennedy and I stared at the picture of Dietz and Durand, basking in our discovery. After a minute or two, we came down from our high and realized we still had a long way to go in proving the case and just a short time to get there.

  “Chris, now that we’ve got this guy, how do we nail him?” Kennedy said as he turned and looked at me.

  “It’s going to be tricky, Kev. We can’t arrest Durand or even let on we know it’s him until we find the computer that sent the incriminating evidence, the lab where he’s been conducting all the experiments, and the last missing woman and her baby.”

  “So how are just the two of us going to pull that off in like three days?” Kennedy said in a sobering voice.

  “We’re going to do surveillance 24/7 on him, for starters,” I said, realizing how lame and weak that sounded. If Durand laid low through the July 4th weekend, he’d get away with it all, because there was no way the Feds and our comrades in blue would pay any mind to what we had. It was all circumstantial.

  We needed to nail Durand on our own—and we needed to do it now.

  Chapter 73

  The Giver turned off the newscast. Dietz’s name and face were still plastered on the screen as the monitor went to black. The Giver sneered, filled with a mixture of satisfaction and loss. He had played the game well. The police, Feds, and the media took everything he fed them hook, line, and sinker. That was reason enough to rejoice. He was in the clear and Dietz, that puny putz who thought his work and opinions on par with his own, was incarcerated and marching towards life in prison, if not execution.

  The Giver had enjoyed this game with Dietz and the cops much more than he expected, almost as much as his work. He was sorry to see it come to a close. But there would be other games, he was sure of that. This one had been a raging success, quite satisfying, and furthered his work. So what if he had yet to receive any credit for his efforts? That would soon change.

  The Giver strolled past the couch he spent many a night sleeping on and into the first of three rooms within The Fertility Institute where he carried out his secret research. “This small lab served me well over the years. Here I made many of my greatest breakthroughs in cloning and manipulating aging.” He sighed. “But the space is just too small.” The Giver ran his hand along the counter top where a liquid chromatographer and electron microscope used to sit. His plans required more equipment and more staff than this space could accommodate. Many of his supplies and much of his machinery had been transferred to the new location already, which was sprawling compared to the lab he stood in now. “By later today they’ll have moved everything to the new lab.”

  Up till now, The Giver could only create clones that were physically and genetically identical to his victims. But the next phase in his plan required that The Giver be able to splice
strands of DNA from a wide assortment of victims so as to create “clones” that looked different. “I only need around ten more victims before my plans are complete,” he said with a smile that transformed into a hideous sneer. “With the new lab a bit north of here, and my facility up and running on the West Coast, we should reach our goal in no time.”

  The Giver had the foresight to plan ahead. Another physician, practicing where the gene pool was different than the New York City metro area, was essential to his plan. That other physician would also provide much needed misdirection when Ravello and his cronies learned Dietz was not their man. “I relish this next phase of operations, but first one last item to take care of.”

  The Giver ran his large hand over the smooth white surface of the freezer next to him. It would be one of the last items transferred to the new lab. What a shame he had to put his last little helper and her baby down. He sooo wanted to show Elizabeth Mueller and her offspring to the police and FBI. But that wouldn’t be possible now. They had their killer incarcerated and the case tied together against Doctor Dietz. It was not yet time to rouse them from their investigative slumber by dropping off the last body. But her acquisition had proved quite fruitful; she had given him just what he needed—fresh cells to harvest.

  Chapter 74

  Durand’s lab at the posh midtown clinic named The Fertility Institute had been another dead end for us. Kennedy and I spent several hours, along with Stippler, combing through every Petri dish, pipette, and Bunsen burner Durand had, not to mention every last notebook and computer file on the premises. Except for a few empty rooms in one wing of the clinic, nothing was out of the ordinary. Nothing even suggested Durand was the psycho killer/mad scientist we were looking for. Security around and within the institute was remarkably light, probably due to the impending holiday, making it easier for us to slip in and out undetected.