by Dick Cluster
“Oh, we group each patient’s vials together, it wouldn’t be hard to extract them all, I’m afraid,” Mary said. “We don’t do inseminations here, so we don’t need to handle individual vials once they’ve been cryopreserved. When a depositor is ready to make use of his deposit, we usually ship all the vials out to the practitioner doing the insemination. The practitioner will keep them in his tank, or hers.”
“Did this Marcia have any kind of container with her?”
“She had a purse,” Donna said. “A big leather one. Let’s see. She had gloves on, to protect her hands. I didn’t see her holding anything at all.”
“She could have dumped them in her purse or held them in her glove till she got out the door,” Jay put in, “and then in the dry ice they’d be okay until she could get them in a proper medium.”
“And normally, how often would you check your inventory?” Fridley asked Mary, ignoring the doctor’s comment.
“Oh, not often.” Mary smoothed her pants leg over her knee. “Well, there’s no reason to, not in the inactives, the longterm storage tank. I check the coolant level, of course, but I don’t pick up the rack and count. Even if I did, that would only be closing the barn door after the horse is gone. You seem to be suggesting someone had the idea of holding a patient’s sperm for ransom? Have you ever run into that sort of thing before?”
“No, but it has commonalities with other cases, and I sometimes doubt there’s anything really original left to be developed by the criminal mind. Ransom kidnappings at first were designed to extort the wealth of individuals, and especially of parents willing to pay anything to save a child, as the word implies. A more recent trend is to hit the wealth of institutions: a bank can be expected to shell out to save its vice president. In this case we may be seeing a new step, that’s all. In a way, we’ve traveled full circle, putting the ‘kid’ back in ‘kidnapping,’ if you will. That is, an insurance company can be expected to shell out to prevent a whopping big settlement in favor of the patient whose sperm was lost. You can imagine what value a jury might place on inability to have a child.”
Fridley looked around to make sure everyone had appreciated this lesson. Or else he’d run that spiel with half his mind while the other was looking for something different, Alex didn’t know. Fridley appeared to be the new breed of FBI, more given to Pentagonese than cop talk. Just as the Pentagon now tended to be staffed by M.B.A.s.
“Well, as I said,” Fridley wrapped up, “it seems that everybody hit the ground running this morning,” He cracked the two women a white-toothed, cold-faced smile. “And the great advantage in this case is that the kidnappers or extortionists don’t actually have the victim in their power. She’s here, under your care, Dr. Harrison, not off in some basement with a weapon up against her temple all the time. Of course, given the delay in bringing us on board, we’ll have to make some adjustments in our normal course of procedure. If I could speak to the blood bank staff as soon as possible, I think that would be the best thing. You know, they’ve already lost a lot of visual detail in the three days that have gone by.”
“Somebody already broke in to the blood bank?” Donna asked, wide-eyed. “That’s why they sent that memo around?”
“If somebody had told us that,” Mary Forziati said acidly, “we could have been a lot better prepared.” This time her disapproval was clearly directed at Jay.
“My sentiments exactly,” Special Agent Fridley told her. “In the case of the blood bank, it was a male disguised as a delivery man for the gas supply company. Or that’s the conclusion, anyway, that Dr. Harrison and his colleagues have reached.”
Jay shrugged. “We had our reasons to try and avoid a panic,” he said to the lab tech by way of explaining the secrecy. “I’m not sure yet we were wrong.” To Alex he said, “There was a gas delivery Monday. The guy came at lunchtime, when Edie wasn’t there. He used the usual procedure, which is to come in the front way and then open the back door that feeds directly to the hall, like this one here. When we called the supplier, though, they said they didn’t have any record of a delivery to us that day.” He turned to the FBI man. “I’ll tell Sandy Sorenson you want to re-interview his people at the blood bank. Maybe we jumped at the impersonator idea because it lets off all the hospital personnel that went in and out.”
“And I’ll want to hear the story you promised me from Mr. Glauberman here.”
“Sure. I just need him for a few minutes first. We had a prior appointment. Then he’s all yours.”
Fridley gave Jay Harrison a long and hard stare, but he didn’t object out loud.
23. To Whom It May Concern
Jay was on the phone talking milligrams of medication when Alex came in. The two ballplayers on the wall, Smith and the Eck, seemed to dwarf him. The wallpaper wasn’t calming. The Japanese designs seemed unnecessary, vain. So much seemed to have changed since Alex had first seen this place.
“She’s better,” Jay said when he hung up. “That’s one good thing. We’ve identified the flora and got the right antibiotic now. But she’s weak, so whatever the next damn thing is, we’ll be in trouble all over again, and maybe worse.” He stopped and scrawled a few quick notes on the pad on his desk. “I’m supposed to be making medical decisions but instead all morning I’ve been with the fucking FBI. The kidnapper said no cops, and at least tacitly we agreed. We’ve got twelve hours, more even, before the two-day deadline runs out. Now there’s cops all over.” He banged his hand flat against his desk in frustration. As he got louder, his face got red.
“So it wasn’t your decision to call in police, even after the sperm bank.” Alex said. Apparently Jay was pissed not only that a wrong call had been made, in his opinion, but also that it had been made over his head.
“My decision? No. Nobody’s even been telling me what’s going on. Now they tell me Fridley’s been on the case since Monday, when I went to Dan Weinstein, who went to the chief of service, who went to the comptroller to get the money. Joe Topakian, the comptroller, said the insurance company would have a shit fit if they found out the theft wasn’t reported to the authorities right away. Because the insurance company would have a shit fit, Joe went to Fridley. He already knew Fridley, if you can believe this, because Fridley conducted a how-not-to-get-kidnapped seminar at some damn executives’ club that Joe is in. This is a medical decision, and Joe Topakian wouldn’t know a stethoscope from a Foley catheter. All along they’ve had the FBI on tap, behind the scenes. Today Fridley got his excuse to come in and start making noise. Sperm samples. Who the hell cares?”
Jay banged his desk again, this time with a closed fist. He stood up and bit his raw knuckle, then looked at it as if he couldn’t understand why it hurt. Alex would have preferred to give him time to vent some steam, but Fridley had to be suspiciously counting the seconds that went by.
“Well, it’s done,” Alex said. “You’re not going to make things better by antagonizing the guy.” Despite all the nonsense about commonalities and kidnapping history, Fridley probably knew how to be organized and businesslike. He might have the time and the staff to check and re-check everyone’s movements, everyone’s alibis, and something might come out of that.
Jay looked at him with amazement, eyes wide open as if he were being squeezed. “Me antagonize him? Before we went downstairs to interview the tech and the receptionist, he pulled me aside to let me know two things right away.”
“What things?” It dawned on Alex that Jay was mad about something more personal than being superseded here.
“Number one, he’d ‘developed information’ about my connections with ‘fugitives’ in the past. Translated, he called Washington and asked them to peek into my old file. Number two, he’d seen the ‘alleged’ blackmail letter I gave to the local police detective, and ‘as a matter of course’ he’d had it ‘professionally correlated’ with material generated by Deborah’s printer and mine. He’d concluded that I wrote the letter myself.”
“You mean he thinks the who
le thing is a scam you’ve been running?” Alex hesitated a second for his emotions to sort themselves out. “To tell you the truth, I wish it were.” Which was as close as he’d come to saying, To tell you the truth, I hope it is. “Then you’d give the marrow back today as promised, and lawyers could fight about whether you really took it or somebody else did.”
“Yeah,” Jay said. “Well, under the circumstances, I had to explain about Foster, and why I changed the original letter, and I had to give Mr. Fridley the original, and he had to cross-check my story with Deborah’s, and all of that. He still doesn’t like me. Only now he’s got me and Foster in collusion on his brain. A hell of a lot of good that investigation is going to do.”
“Did you tell him about my trip to the Coast, and Dee?” Alex didn’t mind the idea of Fridley putting the Dennison Center staff under a microscope. He didn’t want FBI men pawing through Dee Sturdevant’s diary the way those Maryland state troopers had pawed through her purse. Nor did he want them fingering her as “uncooperative” when her principles got in the way. Alex doubted more and more that finding Paul Foster was important. But if it was, surely the feds had better ways of finding him than that.
“You said it yourself, Alex. What’s done is done.”
Right, Alex thought. So Jay had told Fridley he’d sent Alex to see Dee in search of Foster. Only he didn’t yet know about the diary or about Foster’s call. Now Alex would have to call Dee and warn her what was coming. In the meantime, Alex wanted to put to Jay the question she had raised.
“Jay,” he said, “How come you didn’t mention you fell in love that time, on the way west?”
Jay looked blank and then chuckled, only the chuckle turned into a cough. He said, “You’re as bad as Fridley. Now you’re ‘developing information’ about my sex life while he probes my politics, is that it? You’re talking about Barbarella?” His face colored again, though differently, a soft pink rather than an angry red.
“Uh-huh. You had a lot to say about Dee and Foster and feeling lonesome, after all.”
“I don’t know. Barbarella. It didn’t seem important. Is it?”
“She wrote you a letter.”
“She wrote me what letter?”
“An invitation,” Alex said, pointedly checking his watch. “Didn’t Deborah tell you I asked about a letter? From a Barbara Binder? They’re the same person, in case nobody made that clear.”
Jay goggled at him. His expression suggested that the space between atoms had yawned open for him to see.
“She asked about a Barbara Binder. I said I didn’t remember anyone by that name. She didn’t say what was supposed to be in this letter. Are you bullshitting me, or is this some kind of detective methodology? You too, Alex? You’ve decided it was me and Foster? Or the whole gang of us, Foster and me and Dee and Barbarella, like Ocean’s Eleven or the Four Musketeers?”
“Fridley’s waiting for me,” Alex said. “And right now I don’t know what to think. Just tell me whatever you’ve left out so far, please.”
Jay sat down, put his elbows on his desk, and rested his closed eyes on the heels of his hands. He rubbed his scalp with his fingers. Then he slid his fingers down over his forehead, rubbed his eyes with his fingertips, and smiled at Alex in a rueful way. He said, “Okay, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. She had a— a kind of round babydoll face, not Kewpie doll, not a Miss America smile, but like a well-made smiling kind of mask. She had a pardon-the-expression Jewish nose that made the face more interesting to me. She looked like a woman, and it was hard to believe all that was new. I told myself it was ridiculous to fall for this teenager, even if she was thirsty for a lot of stuff I carried around in my head and needed to share. And what are we talking about? We’re talking about a week or so. We’re talking about three or four times we made love together and a lot of hours of long walks and late nights talking, the two of us speed-rapping, as we used to say.”
“Three or four?” Alex asked. Whatever was true or false here, there was no way Jay could have heard from Foster, or thought he’d heard from Foster, and not have spent some time in reminiscences about the other members of that crew. The speech he’d just given was proof of it. Alex wanted to goad him into saying more.
“You’re serious? Let’s see. Four or five, Agent Glauberman. Then a long, long hug in San Francisco International, and then good-bye, out of her life, out of mine. Now you answer me. Who told you she wrote me a letter? I never saw any letter from her.”
“She told me,” Alex answered. “Yesterday morning, in person, about a mile from here. Look, I have to present myself to the special agent before he kicks in the door. But I want to keep at this, too, in my own way. Remember you said, better you than some damn SWAT team? Now I’m feeling the same. I want a letter from you, to whom it may concern. They should please answer my questions, because I’m undertaking some confidential research for you. The information goes directly to you and will be released by you only if and when you consider it medically necessary.”
“Is that true? Or are you going to decide for me what information to release and when and why?”
“I hope it’s true,” Alex said. “Just write me the letter, okay? We’re all trying to get the patient’s marrow back.”
“The high gods call in the FBI,” Jay said as he wrote, “and at the same time they insist that not a word about any of this can get out. So I shouldn’t be doing this, from their point of view, but they can only fire me once. You know that if you charge around asking too many questions, and you panic the kidnapper… As I told Fridley, you’re taking her life, nearly literally, in your hands.”
“Uh-huh.” Alex read the letter, which seemed to be as good as he was going to get. “Among other things, I’m going to tell Fridley that the patient’s marriage has been on the rocks. She thinks, or her neighbor Kevin Royce does, that her doctor husband might just be the one. Can you tell me where Tom Dumars works?”
“He’s got a private office up there in the suburbs someplace, Danvers I think. For his real sickies he has admitting privileges at the General.”
Alex said, “Thanks.” He felt Jay’s eyes follow him all the way to the door. He was almost ready to swear those eyes were honestly and profoundly confused. Alex had done his best to sound tough-minded and confident. He would need to keep sounding that way. It wasn’t how he really felt at all.
24. Out of Their Sleeves
Special Agent Fridley had set himself up in the command room of the Center’s security unit. There wasn’t any sign on the door announcing COMMAND ROOM, but as Alex walked in that was how he saw the place. A bank of video monitors showed the street entrance, the lobby, and several locations that Alex didn’t know. A white man in a tan uniform like Ramon’s sat where he could view the monitors and a computer screen that had a lot of blue boxes on a pink field. The FBI kidnap specialist was sitting on a desk that must have been swept clean of whatever its usual proprietor kept on top. To his left was a pile of message slips, paper-clipped together. To his right were two empty coffee cups. There were no cigarette butts at all.
Fridley walked Alex through everything Alex could tell him from the first meeting with Jay Harrison on. He especially wanted to know anything Alex could tell him about Foster. What had been his rank in the army? When had he received his discharge, and what kind? What radical groups, if any, had been mentioned by name? Alex answered these questions to the best of his ability, if only because his ability was slight. So far the FBI didn’t seem to be having any more success at finding Foster than he’d had himself. Less, even. But Alex kept quiet as planned about Dee’s diary and Foster’s call. He also kept quiet about his conversation with Barbara Binder. He wanted to pursue that avenue himself first. He told all about Kevin Royce’s suspicions. Beyond a few perfunctory questions, Fridley did not display any interest in that.
“Why exactly do you think Dr. Harrison chose you to be his errand boy in all this?” Fridley finally asked.
“I told you. My doctor r
ecommended me, and the idea of a cancer patient helping out tickled Harrison’s fancy, I think. When things got serious, he figured who better could he trust? I never met this woman, the patient— I still haven’t— but we have a lot in common still.”
People asked Alex about the state of his “illness” fairly often, and when he was in a combative mood he sometimes said he didn’t think of himself as “ill.” When you were sick, you had symptoms, you felt bad. He didn’t have any symptoms these days, unless you counted the double vision, and felt no worse than anybody else. What he had was a medical asterisk next to his name. The footnote below the asterisk said, we know what kind of cells are probably lurking in this guy, and we know the statistical chances of these cells succeeding at what they do best, which is to multiply out of control.
Alex got annoyed when people didn’t understand this distinction, but he wasn’t above using their uncertainty to his advantage when he could. The recovering-cancer-patient designation provided a kind of social protection, because people who didn’t have one of those asterisks didn’t know how to act around people who did.
Fridley shut his notepad and slipped it into the inside breast pocket of his suit. “All right,” he said. “I can understand your motive there. No doubt you’re aware that most states have regulations concerning the practice of investigation for any kind of fee.”
“Chapter one-forty-nine, Massachusetts General Laws, sections twenty-one and twenty-two.” Since his social shield seemed to have failed him, Alex pulled one of his friend Bernie’s business cards out of his wallet and handed that to the FBI man. The card bore the name of Bernie’s law firm, an immense and expensive one that filled four floors of a former sail factory near the harbor downtown. Not that Alex could afford to hire Bernie, but a certain amount of representation came with friendship, for free. As a warning, Bernie had given Alex a photocopy of the statute regulating private detectives. Alex had framed it and posted it on the wall of his shop. Bernie did admit that no overburdened state official would want to fight in court about the statute’s application to some marginal freelancer like Alex— unless Alex pissed some powerful person off.
