“Well, I’ll be damned.”
The slide fluoresced brightly. The lung tissues were bathed in Killer T-cells.
Apoptosis. Unlike other forms of cell destruction, which were messy and chaotic, apoptosis was an exceptionally tidy process that left almost no residue. The cells lining the airways were simply gone, having surrendered to the girl’s immune system, which had marked them for death.
But this wasn’t anything like the normal process of apoptosis, which was subtle and restrained. This was suicide on a massive scale.
Ben suddenly wanted to know more about Elmer’s misadventure with the mice — and a whole lot more about Zenavax’s vaccines.
He grabbed the other two slides from his folder, sections of the girl’s pancreas and bile ducts that had been stained with the same immunofluorescent dye.
Again the slides shone brightly with Killer T-cells. As in the lungs, the destruction was precise and devastatingly complete.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned.”
Something had caused the girl’s own immune system to attack these tissues. The question was, what? Every new piece of this puzzle added another question, another mystery. Now, at least, he had a trail to follow.
As he reached for the phone to call Luke, his beeper vibrated.
It was Caleb Fagan’s office number.
Ben wasn’t expecting any pages; one of the other pathologists was on call. Maybe Caleb was contacting him with the test results. Ben had sent a sample of Jane Doe’s lung tissue to Caleb’s lab for some specialized lymphocyte testing.
He reached for the phone and dialed Caleb’s office.
While Luke’s concerns about Barnesdale had seemed a bit overdone at the time, Ben had gone along with the secretive approach, labeling the transmittal slip with an alias and fabricating some fiction about a research project when he’d spoken with Caleb.
Ben had done the same with the tissue he sent to Genetics for chromosome analysis. He wanted to know whether the girl had cystic fibrosis, even though he wasn’t sure how that information would help him solve this puzzle.
“Looks like you’re up with the roosters,” Ben said when Caleb answered.
“Sorry for paging you so early, but I’ve got a lot on my plate today. Maybe you heard — our clinic in Guatemala burnt to the ground. Night before last.”
“No, I didn’t. How’d it happen?”
“I don’t know yet. But look, that’s not why I paged you. I need you to send me another slice of tissue for those lymphocyte studies. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but my usually crack team managed to lose the tissue.”
Ben could hear the irritation in Caleb’s voice, and decided not to probe. “I’ll get another sample up to your lab this morning.”
As soon as Caleb hung up, Ben dialed his lab. He needed to call his chief technician anyway, to discuss the additional slides she was preparing from Jane Doe’s tissues. Some of the special stains he had asked for were no longer relevant — not after what he’d just seen on those two slides. More importantly, a number of tissue-staining techniques he now wanted done weren’t on the to-do list.
His technician answered on the fourth ring. “Margie, listen, I need you to—”
“Dr. Wilson, I was waiting for you to get here. I need to explain — I don’t know how it happened. Oh, God, I just can’t believe this happened.”
“Slow down, Margie. Take a breath and tell me what you’re talking about.”
“The paraffin blocks — all of the organ tissues for that Jane Doe case. We incinerated them.”
“What?”
“I really messed up here, Dr. Wilson. I don’t know how, but I must’ve put them near the stack marked as biological waste. The night shift destroyed all of it. They said it was sitting with all the other stuff that was marked for incineration. I just can’t believe I would’ve done something like that. I just can’t believe it.”
“Neither can I.”
30
Luke was dialing Ben’s home phone number when someone knocked loudly on his front door. He hung up and grabbed Kate’s photograph from beside the phone.
When he opened the door, Lieutenant Groff was standing on the other side of the threshold holding up a wad of folded papers.
“We have a warrant to search these premises,” he said. “Please step outside.”
Luke looked past the lieutenant at three plainclothes detectives with shields dangling from their neck chains. They were lined up in a tight single-file formation on his stairway. All of them wore latex gloves, including Detective O’Reilly, who was at the end of the column, eyeing him.
Two uniformed cops stood at the end of his driveway under the wash of a street lamp. It was 6:29 A.M. and the city was still dark.
“Can I put on some clothes?” Luke was wearing a T-shirt and scrub pants, and his feet were bare.
“No.”
Luke didn’t care about his clothing. He was stalling while deciding whether to tell the cops about the mysterious package, including the photograph that he was still holding in his left hand. If he told them, O’Reilly would almost certainly assume the worst and conclude that he’d had the e-mail all along. The detective would reason that Luke was telling them only to preempt the more incriminating scenario of their discovering the items during their search.
Luke thought back to the attorney’s advice—keep your mouth shut—and decided to wait until later, when his disclosure wouldn’t seem suspect.
“This is your copy of the warrant.” Groff tapped Luke’s chest with the papers. “Now, please step outside.”
Luke took the papers with his right hand while lifting his left hand and placing the photograph against the bottom of the stack. He used Groff’s body to conceal his maneuver from the other cops.
The lieutenant turned and gave a hand signal to the uniformed cops. One of them trotted down the driveway toward the backyard, while the other loitered at the front of the property with her thumbs hooked around her gun belt.
Even before Luke was completely through his front doorway, Groff disappeared inside. O’Reilly and the female detective from his interrogation session followed behind their boss.
An overly muscled detective with spiked blond hair remained on the small landing with Luke.
“Mind if I sit?” Luke asked.
Muscles let his eyelids droop and cracked a knuckle.
Luke slid down against the stucco wall and flipped through the search warrant. Some of the listed items told him things about the killer’s methods:.338 caliber rounds, rifles with barreling that was visually compatible with.338 ammunition, sighting scopes, and so on. A few of the items, like “athletic shoes” and “hiking boots,” suggested that they might already have some forensic evidence that could ID the killer.
Good. Maybe this would end here.
Nothing on their search list gave them a reason to examine his desk, and he remembered slipping the e-mail back into its envelope. He could tell O’Reilly about Kate’s e-mail later.
Luke stared out through the decorative iron balustrade. Spanish-tile rooftops on the hillside below him crept into view as the sky turned from black to gray.
No one said anything to him for the next ten minutes. The monotony was broken only occasionally by his hardwood floors creaking under the weight of a footstep, or the murmur of clipped conversation.
O’Reilly appeared in the entry, huddling with Groff. The two men spoke in a muted tone with their backs turned to Luke.
A minute later O’Reilly came through the front door, holding up Kate’s e-mail message. “This was sitting in the open, next to your computer,” he lied. “Were you planning to tell me about it at some point?”
“It showed up on my doorstep this morning, in a plain envelope.”
“I see.” The detective looked at the paper. “Just like that, it showed up on your—”
“Chocolate fan, huh?” Groff shouted at Luke from the entry hall.
The female detective was holding a plastic bag wit
h several Mr. Goodbar wrappers.
Luke struggled not to shiver in the morning air while wondering what possible interest his candy bar wrappers could hold for them.
“I have a whole drawerful,” he said. “You can have them if you bring me a jacket.”
Groff called O’Reilly back inside. For several minutes they stood in a cluster. Groff held up one of Luke’s running shoes by the tongue while O’Reilly and the female cop studied the rubber sole. Their gaze went back and forth between the bottom of his shoe and what looked like a photograph that Groff had pulled from his briefcase.
Luke slipped Kate’s photograph into the back pocket of his scrub pants while Muscles was leaning over the railing to sneeze.
When the three detectives came outside again, both of Luke’s shoes were sitting in plastic bags. “These yours?” asked Groff.
Even in the dim light, Luke could see that his shoes were streaked with mud. Something was wrong. He didn’t wear those shoes when the ground was wet; he had another pair he used on rainy days. “I’m not sure.”
“Take a good look.” Groff turned the bags in front of Luke’s face. “Nike. Size eleven. These look like yours?”
The laces were untied. Luke always kicked his shoes off after a run. He never bothered to untie the laces.
“C’mon,” Groff said. “This shouldn’t be too hard. Don’t make us look for DNA traces in your dried sweat. Be a sport.”
Old habits kicked in. Luke studied each detective as they fanned out around him — how their eyes responded to the environment, where they carried their weapons, how their bodies moved — sizing each threat while his senses took in the smallest details of each movement and sound.
“I think I want to talk to an attorney,” he said finally.
“Well, you’re gonna get that chance because you’re under arrest for suspicion of murder. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say…”
Luke didn’t hear most of it. His mind was busy fighting a war of its own.
He was being framed. Hardened reflexes screamed at him to evade and escape. His intellect reminded him of the absurdity of that choice.
“…you have the right to speak to an attorney, and…”
This was insane! Someone was setting him up and he had no idea why. He’d never find out if they locked him away in a cage.
“If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be…”
Who was doing this? Did this have something to do with Kate’s murder?
“Please place both hands behind your head.”
Primal instincts took over. Luke’s foot plunged into Groff’s midsection. The detective tumbled down the stairway, carrying Muscles with him.
An instant later Luke was on his feet. He swept the woman’s legs before her gun had cleared the holster. She went sprawling as he head-butted O’Reilly. The detective melted into a puddle.
Luke ran through his front door and down the short hallway into his bedroom. He grabbed the blanket from his bed and threw it over his head before plunging through the closed window.
Glass shattered. He tried to pull the blanket off and extend his arms before the ground came up to meet him.
He didn’t quite make it, and the ten-foot drop sent a bolt of pain through the left side of his body. Shattered glass rained down on him.
He expected a shouted command — or gunshot — as he came up onto his feet in the backyard. Instead, he saw no one. The uniform must have sprinted back up the driveway.
Luke hurtled toward the bushy hillside at the rear of the property.
* * *
Megan listened to the jungle awaken as she sat behind a thin barrier of reeds and ferns along the bank of the murky green river. A shaft of sunlight broke through the canopy overhead, and birds began squawking at one another in rhythmless pulses.
She hugged her legs and rested her chin on a pair of wobbly knees. A wet T-shirt sagged over her shoulders, and her shivering legs struggled to hold their purchase on the sloping riverbank.
She had remained in the river far too long. Her body was battling hypothermia. For what seemed like an hour, she had bobbed around in total darkness, bouncing off unseen rocks and scraping past low-hanging branches that reached out and speared her. Eventually, exhaustion had overtaken her resolve and she blindly clawed her way onto the river’s edge.
For the second time in as many hours, she wondered whether she was going to die in this wilderness. The Callahans were cursed, it seemed, but she had always pictured her life as having some purpose. The thought that her life, its work unfinished, might be extinguished in this alien place carried her to a desolate corner in her soul. That she might die alone, her death as inconsequential and unnoticed as a fly caught in a spider’s web, uncovered a loneliness that scraped at her soul with a dreadful indifference.
The slow-moving water lapped against the silty riverbank. She had to stay silent. Her pursuers might still be searching for her, and they likely would have followed the river’s path.
Megan shuddered when something small and dark skittered past her. The ache in her hand returned when she swiped at a large fern to let the creature know that it wasn’t welcome. She held her palms up and examined the damage. Her skin was hidden under wet silt, but the throb told her that she had sprained her right thumb.
“Ouch. Get away from me, you little shit!”
It was a man’s voice, speaking English, on the opposite side of the river.
Megan’s mind melted into a pool of fear. Her body shook uncontrollably.
The sound of water thrashing, then, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, forgive me my sins, but I’m coming after you, you little bloodsucker…”
The voice was that of an older man, the accent unmistakably American. It had a brassy New York quality, like Brooklyn or Queens.
Megan crawled to the river’s edge, using the man’s shouts to disguise the sound of her movements. She spread two large fronds and looked across the river.
On the other side, several yards downstream, a naked man was standing knee-deep in water. He was short and had a slight build. His forearms and neck were brown, the rest of his skin pearl-white. Folds of skin sagged over his waist.
He suddenly jerked a leg out of the water, lost his balance and fell backward into the river. “That’s it, you little pecker…” Using a leafy branch, the old man whacked the muddy water with a fury while hurling colorful epithets at the unseen creature.
Eventually he gave up the battle and stepped onto the shoreline. A small brown man appeared from behind a thicket, passed the old man a ragged towel, and stood by as his pale companion dried himself. Next, the dark-skinned man handed pieces of clothing to the man and watched as he dressed.
When he finished dressing, the old man took something from his rucksack, kissed it, and draped it around his neck.
A large gold crucifix glinted in the sunlight.
Megan stuck her head out of the brush and glanced up and down the riverbank, looking for any sign of her assailants.
When she looked back, the dark-skinned man was pointing at her. The older man turned.
She ducked behind a palm leaf.
A second later the older man called out, “Buenos días. ¿Está bien?”
Megan took a deep breath, then poked her head out.
“I need help,” she said.
31
Luke bounded onto the fire road in a dead run and sprinted west on the upward slope of a trail into the interior of Griffith Park. He had moved methodically through the steep and heavily wooded hillside behind his property. It had cost him time, but disguising his tracks was his only chance. He hoped the cops were still combing the area that he had marked with trampled undergrowth and broken branches. He needed a few minutes of confusion.
The charcoal sky was giving way to shades of gray-violet, but the sun was still hiding on the other side of the hill. His lungs were already on fire, but he couldn’t stop to rest until he had at least a half-mile lead on the hunters. He’d spread them o
ut, force them to expand the search area. If he could do that, his meager advantages would come into play. He knew how to use the shadows of early dawn to evade and conceal. He also knew the terrain, and how to disappear into it.
Echoes of an earlier life pounded at him as he raced up the hill. He could feel a dark core reigniting, smoldering ashes suddenly finding fuel. He fought to ignore the waves of dread that passed through him.
The whomp-whomp-whomp of a helicopter played in the distance. They couldn’t have vectored a helicopter in on him this quickly, he figured, but in another five minutes the sky overhead would be swarming with aircraft.
The jagged edges of half-buried rocks slashed at his bare feet. He lengthened his stride, ignored the pain. He couldn’t leave the trail until he had put more distance between himself and the hunters.
Speed and distance were all that mattered. Nothing else.
He held that thought until he came around a blind curve on the trail. A black Doberman was waiting for him, snarling, its teeth bared.
Luke dove off the trail and rolled down the slope, tumbling over sharp rock edges and scraggly dry vegetation until he finally came to a stop in tall grass on the lip of a small gully. He rolled into the depression and scanned the hill above him.
He mopped a painful spot on the back of his neck with his T-shirt. It came back dark red.
The dog stared down at him, growling and scraping at loose gravel on the edge of the trail. Small rivulets of sand streamed down the hill.
Ten feet to his right, a concrete culvert hung over the edge of a small knoll. He scurried over and tucked himself under the overhang. His chest heaved and he struggled to control his breathing.
A woman’s voice yelled, “Samson…Samson, get back here!”
Stigma Page 20
