Larry leaned back in his rocking chair. He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves. Faded tattoos ran up and down his forearms. Green ink blurred into sun-hardened skin. I couldn’t read any of it, but I guessed they’d been unit numbers and insignia. Which might explain a few things about Larry.
“What’d you do before you got this place?” I asked.
“Ten years in the navy. Then twenty with LAPD,” he said. He indicated the house with a nod. “My wife was in real estate, so this thing was her deal.”
“How long since you retired?”
“Nine years.”
“But you still know how to look at a guy in the dark and take down the details.”
“You got that right.”
“It’s not a skill you forget.”
“It isn’t.”
I stood up, and he didn’t. I was about to thank him and walk off, and then I thought of something else.
“You ever heard of a place twenty miles up the road?” I asked. “Something called the Creekside?”
He looked up at me, paused, and seemed to consider an answer.
“The Creekside?”
“That’s what they call it.”
“Who’s they?”
“The members. It’s supposed to be a private club.”
“Never heard of it.”
“You get people stopping through who talk about a secret club? Something way out in the woods?”
Again, his eyes went far away. He was weighing an answer.
“If it was a secret, why would they talk about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “But I never heard about anything like that around here.”
Instead of going back to the cottage, I walked across the highway and climbed out on a ledge of rock that hung fifty feet above Slaughterhouse Cove. The waves were breaking just beneath me, but there wasn’t much of a swell today. I got out my flip phone. Reception was down to one bar. I dialed my forensics guy, George Wong.
He picked up on the fifth ring and said, “Who’s this?”
“Are you in the lab?”
“Lee Crowe?”
“That’s right. Can you hear me?”
“Mostly. I didn’t recognize the number.”
“I’m just using this phone awhile,” I said. “You done anything yet?”
“You didn’t get my email?”
“It’s been hard for me to check it—can you run me through it?”
I turned to look south, then glanced to the left. I could see the Drake Cottage on the hill above the road. The curtains in the bathroom were drawn. Claire’s rental car was still in the parking lot. It looked like Madeleine was settling in.
“I’ll start with the old stuff,” George said. “Because, frankly, it makes more sense.”
“Okay.”
“I found six prints on the box. I ran them all, but only got two hits.”
“You actually got IDs?”
“Yeah, but it’s not what you want,” George said. “I called a friend at Quantico, and he ran them through all the archives I’m not supposed to have. The hit came off a military database. Your priest, David Martinez, was a GI before he took the collar.”
“What was the other hit?”
“You—from the California DMV database.”
“So prints are a dead end.”
“Sure,” George said. “So then I went to town on the blanket.”
“I think it’s a swaddle.”
“Same difference. The stains are blood, and the DNA matches the hair you gave me.”
“So we know it was Claire in the box. She was bleeding when she got dropped at the church.”
“Yeah,” George said. “We know that. But I went over the blanket with a magnifying glass and a fine comb. And I found a hair.”
“What kind of hair?”
“Short, black, and straight. It might’ve come off a man’s head—but don’t get excited, because this wasn’t like the hair you gave me. It didn’t have the root and follicle attached.”
“So you can’t get DNA from it,” I said.
On the highway, a tan SUV slowed as it approached from the north. Its turn signal lit up, and then it went into the B&B’s lot. It parked in front of the main house and a man got out. I didn’t think much of it. The place was bound to get another customer eventually. Another truck was coming down the highway, and I turned to face the ocean so I could hear George over the cacophony of diesel engines and air brakes.
“That’s not totally true,” he said. “The nucleus gets destroyed in the cornification process—when the cell transitions into hair. But you can get mitochondrial DNA from a hair because the mitochondria are preserved.”
“Run me through what that means.”
“Every cell has mitochondria, right? They’re like the power plants for cellular life.”
“Okay.”
“And they have their own DNA. Your mitochondrial DNA comes entirely from your mother. So yours would be identical to hers, and hers would be identical to your grandmother’s and so on, with only the usual variances for mutation.”
“So you can’t use it to identify people, is what you’re saying.”
I turned around and scanned the bed-and-breakfast. Larry was still on his rocking chair, watching me. I nodded at him, but couldn’t tell if he responded. The tan SUV was still parked out front, but the driver was gone. He’d either gone to his room or he was in the main house, checking in.
“That’s right,” George said. “But you can tell other things.”
“Like what, for example?”
“Like that whoever left that hair on the blanket was probably Korean.”
“Korean?”
I looked up the hill to the Drake Cottage. Madeleine was out on the deck, leaning on the rail. There was a glass next to her elbow. She waved to me, and I waved back.
“We don’t have any of the priest’s DNA, but unless his mother was Korean, you can rule out Martinez. Same for the bishop, for your client, and for the little girl.”
“And me,” I said. “My mother wasn’t Korean.”
“So there you go,” George said. “A clue.”
“I’m looking for a Korean. That narrows it to what—eighty million people?”
George ignored me and went on.
“And in a way, it might fit with the other thing I found. Which is where it gets weird,” he said. “You got time for this?”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“It’s about the girls,” George said. “You gave me the hair and the bottle, and asked me to compare them. I did, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I looked up again. The door to the deck was open, as were the windows in the sitting room. The white curtains fluttered inward on the gentle wind.
Madeleine was gone, and the tan SUV was racing out of the driveway and onto the road. Heading north.
23
“Actually, I might not have much time,” I said. I was climbing off the rock ledge and scrambling back up to the road. “So if you can run it quick, that’d be good.”
“I can lay it out in one sentence,” George said. “They’re identical twins, but they have different mothers.”
“What?” I asked. Now I was moving across the road. Not quite running, but walking fast. “How is that possible?”
“Remember what I told you about mitochondrial DNA? I tested that, too, because I had to rule them out for the hair. Their nuclear DNA is identical, so they’re twins. But their mitochondrial DNA profiles are completely different, which means their eggs came from different women.”
“I thought identical twins came from one egg. That the egg splits in two and makes copies of itself.”
“That’s right. That’s where twins come from—real twins, I mean.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“How much do you know about cloning?”
It took me a few seconds to even come up with a response.
“I thought that
was just sheep and dogs,” I said. “Or crops. I thought they hadn’t ever tried it on a human.”
“Until this morning, I was right there with you,” George said. “If you think the scientific hurdles are hard to clear, just imagine the legal ones. But look—the way cloning works is you take the DNA from the nucleus of a host cell and implant it in an egg. That’s really all there is to it. And if you did that a couple of times, with the same nuclear DNA, but eggs from different women, then you’d have exactly what I’m looking at. Identical twins with nonidentical mitochondrial DNA.”
“Isn’t there another explanation?”
“Not that I can think of, unless you want to rewrite everything we know about mitochondrial DNA inheritance.”
There was a truck coming, and I was still partially in the road. It swerved around me, its horn blaring. I got off the road and started down the driveway.
“You said something about Korea making sense,” I said. “That it fit with what you’d found.”
“Maybe it’s not a big deal. But imagine that twenty years ago you wanted to have a dog cloned. Maybe some other complex mammal. Where would you have gone?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Korea?”
“That’s right—the South Koreans were pioneers. Their reputation took a hit ten years ago. One of their scientists got caught faking his research and got booted out of Seoul National University. But still—and I mean, to this day—if you want to lay out a small fortune and clone Fluffy and Rufus, it’s Korea or nowhere.”
“You’re saying the hair on the swaddle might have come from . . . what? A scientist? Some kind of genetic engineering expert?”
George paused, which was unusual for him. I started walking again, staying on the far side of the lot so that I wouldn’t have to acknowledge Larry, or even look at him. I made it to the stepping-stone path before George stopped me midstride once again.
“I’m going to go out on a limb here,” he said. “I’m not just saying it’s some random Korean scientist. I might actually know the guy’s name.”
“What?”
“I might have even met him once,” George said. “Before he disappeared.”
I could see the Drake Cottage up ahead. The front and back doors were open. I could look straight through the little house to the ocean.
“What are you telling me, George?”
I started walking again, getting off the stepping-stones and onto the grass so that I could approach the cottage without making noise.
“It’s not a sure thing. It’s just a guess. And I think the dates fit,” George said. “When did you say the older woman was born?”
“ ’Ninety-six,” I said.
“Then it’s almost perfect,” George said. “Look, in the nineties, there was one guy in Seoul who was writing paper after paper on nuclear transfer, and gene synthesis, and some things closer to my line of work, like DNA sample amplification. His name was Dr. Park Kwung-ho. You heard of him?”
“Why would I have?”
“It made the papers here, when he disappeared. In 1994.”
In 1994, I was still in high school. I was dividing my time between a pair of places I wasn’t supposed to be: a Tacoma boxing gym and a girlfriend’s bedroom. I sometimes read the paper, but my mind was entirely occupied with concerns more immediately at hand.
“What did you hear about it?” I asked.
“There was some chatter in my circles. You know those old stories about the North Koreans, how they used to kidnap people off the beaches in Japan?”
“Sure.”
“People thought maybe it was something like that. They wanted him—God knows what they could do with his skill set—so they came and grabbed him.”
“You believed that?”
“I didn’t give it much thought,” George said. “But if there was one guy in the midnineties who could have cloned a human being, it was probably Dr. Park.”
“What are you saying?”
“Maybe he didn’t end up in North Korea or get lost in the woods. Maybe he took a job.”
“In California.”
“If he wasn’t kidnapped, somebody hired him,” George said. “Brought him over here to set up a lab.”
“A lab for what?”
“Something secret enough that he had to fall off the map. And lucrative enough that he’d agree to do it.”
I thought of the woman Larry had seen the night Claire died. A woman with a chauffeur, and enough jewelry that even an old cop noticed it. I didn’t know her real name, but Claire had given me something to call her.
Madame X.
“He never turned up?” I asked. “This guy, Dr. Park?”
“Not that I know of. The FBI had a file on it.”
“How do you know?”
“A couple agents interviewed me about it, in ’ninety-four or ’ninety-five. Because I’d had some emails back and forth with him, and they were going through all his contacts.”
“Why was the FBI involved?”
“He was prominent, and the North Koreans might have had a hand. So of course there was a file. We had a file on everything like that.”
“If they’d found something later on, would they have told you?”
“I don’t know . . . maybe not.”
“Could you ask around?”
“Sure.”
Without climbing the steps, I peered inside the cottage. The cushions from the little couch were on the floor. Out on the deck, a drinking glass lay on its side, ice cubes and water spreading out in front of it.
“Thanks for this, George,” I said. “But I’ve gotta go.”
“Sure.”
I folded the phone and pocketed it. Outside the cottage, in a bed of peonies, I spotted a small concrete statue. Neptune, maybe, or Zeus. It was eighteen inches tall. I picked it up by the head, hefted it so that I could swing it one-handed like a hammer, and went through the front door.
Inside, it took about ten seconds to see I didn’t need a weapon. There was nowhere to hide except the shower, and that was empty. Claire’s suitcase was gone, along with her computer. My backpack, which had held my own laptop, was also missing. The room had been haphazardly tossed. Drawers were open, the bedcovers had been ripped off and thrown to the side. In the bathroom, the lid had been shoved from the toilet’s tank, and it had shattered on the porcelain floor.
I walked out onto the deck and looked back at the ocean. I could see the ledge where I’d been talking to George while this had happened. It must have gone down in under a minute. The question was how they had taken Madeleine. Larry, sitting in his rocking chair, would know if she’d been dragged to the SUV or if she’d walked to it willingly. The thing had been parked thirty feet from him. He must have seen me walking back across the parking lot. If he’d seen the same blond girl get kidnapped from his parking lot twice in one week, wouldn’t he have said something to me?
There was nothing to do but go and ask him. I stopped outside the front door and set the statue back where I’d found it. Then I walked back down the path, under the lattice arches, the roses at full blossom and drawing bees.
I was thinking: She played me.
She’d used me until she got to Claire’s computer, and then she’d called her friends. She tossed the room to make it look like she’d been taken by force, but she’d relaxed once she’d left the cottage. Larry had been sitting right there; if anything had seemed strange, he would have raised an alarm. He hadn’t said a thing.
In the confusion of that moment, it made sense. It seemed wholly logical. Or, at any rate, it explained all the facts as I knew them. She must have stolen Claire’s things, taken my computer to hobble my investigation. I still didn’t know who she was or what she wanted. But I was sure, right then, that she wasn’t on my side.
At which point, I turned the corner and mounted the steps to the main house, and looked up. In one glance, my story fell apart. The facts had changed.
Larry’s shirt was red, and the flannel was abso
rbent. From across the road, I hadn’t been able to see what was now plainly visible. He’d been shot dead center in the chest. He was still in the rocking chair, hands gripping each armrest. His chin was resting against his sternum. There was a pool of blood in his lap and on the wooden seat.
From that point, and for the next ten minutes, I was on full automatic. I began climbing the stairs toward him, and stopped when I felt something underfoot. I’d stepped on a white towel. I must have stooped to pick it up, because I remember powder burns stippled down its center, and light shining through a series of holes. As if it had been folded like a Chinese fan and wrapped around the muzzle of the gun. A makeshift silencer. The man must have pulled the trigger seconds after exiting the car. The towel had covered some of the noise, and the rest of it had been blocked by the truck passing in front of me.
I crossed the porch, went right up to the rocking chair.
“Larry?”
Of course he wasn’t going to answer, but right then I didn’t understand that. I knelt next to him, and for the third time in nearly as many days, I put my hand on another person’s throat and felt for a pulse that was nowhere to be found. Doing that must have tipped the rocking chair back, because when I let go and stood up, the chair tilted forward and Larry tipped out. He fell onto the porch, his head making a hollow thunk on the old redwood.
I looked for help, with Larry spilled around my feet. But there was no one else around. A mixed blessing. On the one hand, there was no one who could point an accusatory finger at me. On the other hand, there wasn’t anyone else who could take over.
It was just me, and I knew what I had to do next.
The front door was wide open. I stepped over the threshold and into the lobby and crossed to the desk. I didn’t need to ring the little bell. I could see the woman’s feet protruding from behind the reception desk. I’d never learned her name, and now there was no point. A thick mist of blood dotted the wall. Clumps of hair lay on the carpet and the desktop. Even in my state, I could imagine the bullet’s trajectory. I went around the desk, but didn’t kneel beside her. It only took a glance at her head to see that there was no point in searching for a pulse.
I know there’s very often a shortfall between a man’s achievements and his aspirations. Between who he is and who he wants to be. And I’m hardly a special case. Look at me, and what I’ve done with my life. If there was a measure of my progress it was this: I was shocked. I didn’t think about taking a picture. It never even crossed my mind. Or if it did, I don’t remember it: Within a few hours of leaving Slaughterhouse Cove, I went through a second trauma, and one that was much more personal. From what I know about head injuries, it’s fair to assume there are details about that day I don’t remember.
Blood Relations Page 18