by B. J. Graf
“Mom.” I reached out and placed my hand over hers. She stopped shredding. Then she’d sighed deeply. Tears crawled noiselessly down her face.
“I know I should have told you a long time ago, Eddie.” My mother’s voice went strangely flat. Her eyes stayed fixed on the street. “But you two fought so much, and it was just a little white lie.” She paused and turned her head. Mom glanced pleadingly at Jo and back to me again. “To keep the peace.”
“Tell me about the lie,” I said.
“I wanted you so much, Eddie. You don’t know how much. I thought a baby would – fix things, you know, make everything alright between your father and me. But your father - couldn’t. All the drugs, I guess. Anyway he couldn’t. So – we got help.”
“What kind of help?” I flashed on all those stories of kids who’d found out they were adopted. But those kids weren’t me. I had my birth certificate. I’d been born in the KP-Medcenter back when it was called something else. Both my mother and father were listed in the appropriate parental unit spaces.
“Fertility treatments,” Mom replied. “Dr. Singh helped us with the IVF.”
In vitro fertilization. Dr. Singh had apparently been her fertility specialist as well as OB-GYN.
“Dad agreed to that?” It was hard to imagine my father admitting his swimmers needed any outside help. Admitting any weakness.
Mom’s eyes brimmed, but she didn’t answer.
I nodded. “So, he didn’t know.”
She fixed her eyes on her hands in her lap.
I nodded again. “You used a sperm donor.”
Her tears slid down the creased skin, making her black eye makeup run. “I never wanted Ed to think you weren’t his, Eddie. I didn’t want him to feel different about you than he would about - his own biological child.”
“I’m 29, Mom,” I’d said. “When were you gonna tell me?”
More tears were her answer. There was the sick joke. I might not be his blood relative, but I still had one thing in common with Piedmont Sr. I’d made my mother cry.
------
The reception was held at Mom’s church. It all went smoothly. I laughed and joked with guests, pouring drinks and balancing a tray of little sandwiches Jo had ordered up from some fashinonable new Brazilian restaurant.
“We have wait-staff to do that,” Jo said. “You alright?”
“Don’t I seem alright?”
“Better than alright,” Jo said. “I can see your molars when you smile.”
Six hours later, after we had seen the last guest out, driven my mother home and ourselves back to L.A., I pulled off my tie and shoes and collapsed onto the sofa in the Peninsula Hotel. Jo had booked us a room for a week until our place had been restored. She came over and perched on the sofa’s back.
“You sure your mother didn’t want to come stay with us?”
I shook my head. “Too tired. She wanted to sleep in her own bed. Maria, that friend from her church, is staying with her. I’ll check on her tomorrow. You hungry?”
“Starving.” Jo had been so busy with guests she’d forgotten to eat.
I checked my glove phone. “Come on.” I leapt up and pulled Jo to her feet with me. “Where we going?” she said as we ran to the car.
“Little Havana.” I backed the Porsche out onto the street. “Their food truck’ll be in the parking lot behind Jorge’s Liquor in twenty minutes. If we hurry, we can beat the line.”
“Oh my god,” Jo said, laughing with me as I cut through back alleys and side streets. “Use the Traffic Light Expediter!”
“No skill in that.” Little Havana made the best Sandwich Cubano outside Miami or Havana. Even without the TLE we made pretty good time. In thirty minutes, the line of customers snaked through the parking lot and half way down the block, but we were leaning against the Porsche savoring Italian bread grilled to perfection and stuffed with ham, succulent roast pork, Swiss cheese, zucchini pickles and mustard. I watched an elderly couple in NPR hoodies holding hands. Neither Jo nor I spoke until half our respective sandwiches were gone.
“We should tell them to pick a more scenic locale,” Jo said, kicking an empty beer bottle, one of several strewn around the tarmac like party favors.
“That would just draw a bigger crowd.” I popped the top from a bottle of beer and offered it to her.
Jo made a face. “No thanks.”
I took a swig as we continued to chow down on our sandwiches. A forty-something ginger-haired father in a Dartmouth College tee lifted his toddler son onto his shoulders as they waited.
Jo sighed. “What a day.”
“Yeah. I always knew my family was fucked up. But you know what I realized today?”
“You don’t have to hate your father anymore?” Jo said.
“Right, I can start hating Mom instead.”
Jo playfully punched my shoulder.
I shrugged and smiled. “For as long as I can remember, my…” I paused. “I don’t even know what to call him now. My father in name only? Anyway, we were at each others’ throats my whole life. I was sure sooner or later he was gonna kill me, or I was gonna kill him. It was in our blood, like a curse. I left home at fifteen to keep that from happening. And all the time I’ve been living a complete lie.”
“You’re upset,” Jo said. “Give yourself a break. You just buried your father.”
“He wasn’t my father. That’s the point. I don’t know who I am.”
Jo’s face darkened. “Eddie,” she said. “Blood isn’t everything. Don’t you see? You’re right. He wasn’t your father. You’re free. You can finally move on with your life.” Jo met my gaze and held it. “I know who you are. You’re my Eddie. You know you have me, right? We’re family.”
I took her hand and squeezed it tight. “I’ll never leave you, Jo.” I turned her hand over and kissed it. “That’s a promise.”
“I’m a lawyer. I want it in writing.” She leaned into me and kissed me back – lightly brushing my lips with hers. Jo reached into her purse and, with a show of hesitation, pulled out a baggie. “As for moving on, this isn’t how I planned to tell you, but…”
Jo turned her hand over. In her palm lay a white plastic wand inside the baggie. She held out her hand so I could see the wand close-up. The home pregnancy test had turned a vivid blue.
I blinked and I stared at the wand. I was going to be a father. My stomach dropped about twenty floors. “When?”
“April. I’m almost four months in now.”
“April.”
She nodded.
“The thin blue line,” I said finally. “Do you think that means he’ll be a cop?”
Jo pointed to the technology readout on the side of the wand, detailing sex and general good health. “She might want to be an artist. Or a lawyer.”
“Not a criminal defense attorney,” I said, “please.” Picking up Jo’s left hand, I held it out. “You still have the ring?”
She cocked her head and shot me a look. “Of course.”
“Hold onto it.” I ran into the liquor store and came out with a bottle of champagne and two plastic flutes. Jo was laughing as I walked to my car and popped the trunk. I pulled out my practice katana, the one I used for kata. I peeled the foil and little wire basket off the top of the bottle, felt for the seam in the glass and, with a smooth strike along the seam, popped the top off the champagne. The cork and its severed circle of glass shot ten feet across the parking lot.
“I’m not part of the Cassandra franchise,” I said as the wine gushed out into the plastic flutes, “but I’ll tell you your future, counselor. I see a wedding. A big one.”
“I don’t need a big wedding,” Jo said, leaning into me as I downed the champagne. “But let’s make it legal soon. I don’t want to be fat when Craig walks me down the aisle.”
I nodded. The tiger had rolled over again. I was going to be a husband and a father.
I couldn’t keep the goofy smile off my face.
I’d never been so happy - or so sc
ared.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The next day, after Jo had left for the office, I called San Diego from our suite in the Beverly Hills Peninsula hotel and checked in on my mother. She and her friend Maria were finishing up breakfast. Sitting on the edge of the hotel bed, I chomped down on a piece of rye toast from room service and watched my mother brew her second pot of coffee. My mother’s breakfast plate was untouched. And lit by the morning sun streaming in her kitchen window, she looked faded and thin, like a photo left too long in the sun. Whatever I thought of Piedmont Senior, my mother had loved him.
“I’m fine, Eddie,” Mom’s floating image said. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
“I know,” I lied. “I really called to tell you the big news. You’re gonna need a new dress, Mom. Get something nice. I’m buying.”
She stared at me, frowning, for several beats before her expression lightened. “You’re finally getting married!” It was the first time a smile had reached her eyes in a long while.
I nodded. “There’s more.” I told her the good news about the baby. By the time we disconnected, I was happy to see Mom deep into plans for making her granddaughter a wardrobe that would last the kid through high school.
As for myself, I planned to spend the day with the wrap-up on the Devonshire case files after I swung by the house to check on the restoration work. Barely an hour had passed when I rolled into the drive of the Venice house.
Craig’s cleaning crew had been hard at work, clearing out detritus, re-hanging paintings and generally putting things to right. As I looked around the room, the painting hanging over the fireplace grabbed my attention. An abstract oil by Xervenka Zentos, one of Jo’s favorite contemporary artists, the design was a patchwork of sea greens and greys with flecks of gold shrouded in the depths of receding plains. Staring at the canvas, something struck me. The abstract looked different – wrong.
There was a smudge on the lower right-hand side of the painting that didn’t belong. Odd how the painting’s jagged lines, the patches of green and grey, and ink black shadows suggested a different mood when the eye was drawn to the wrong focal point by that oily smudge.
Some soiled glove on a clean-up crew member, I thought. No art critic, he wouldn’t have known what the abstract was supposed to look like. So, he hadn’t noticed the smudge - right there in front of his face.
That smudge – I felt the familiar tingling on the back of my hands and neck I get when something overlooked suddenly comes together in a case.
Flipping my Nokia Handy on, I rushed to pull up the blood spot from the Devonshire 51 file. Leaning in so close my nose almost brushed the pixels, I scrutinized the tiny piece of genetic flotsam and jetsam.
The partial prelim resembled a standard identification barcode. But where the dark vertical lines of a barcode are sharp, the black lines of the partial were fuzzy - like smudged charcoal. Nothing odd there.
Then I saw it - a tiny dark line, almost a shadow, at the very bottom of the code which I’d never taken note of. Too small to make out with the naked eye, I magnified it fifty, then one hundredfold.
Each hair on the back of my neck prickled as individual letters in the smudge became legible.
I could just make out the letters and numbers: D-3331110. I felt the old rush.
Not an exact match - Lee’s file name started with the letters AI, not D. But the block of numbers he’d choked out before dying, the seven-digit series I’d initially taken for a phone number, the same series repeated in Lee’s encrypted file with a different prefix, AI, was right here staring me in the face. Serial number identifiers? Lee’s file had to be linked to this blood spot, but how, exactly?
I pushed a call through to the crime lab, and left word for serologist Jim Mar, marking the message urgent. The case may have been cleared, but I still wanted to know how all the pieces fit. Something kept nagging at me.
I texted Shin an update on my way back to the hotel.
I’d planned to spend the rest of the afternoon on the file, merging Frank’s notes with Shin’s and mine for the official record. I had just started to Google the numbers with the AI and D prefixes when Jo walked in on all the excitement. I’d forgotten we’d planned to celebrate our future.
“Let me jump in the shower,” I said. “I’ll be ready in ten.”
“Take your time. I want to change too.” Jo’s voice was lightly teasing. “Maybe I’ll join…”
She paused in mid-sentence, shook her blonde head and smiled. “What do patents have to do with your case?”
“Patents?” I followed her gaze to my Google search.
With her well-manicured index finger Jo pointed to the numbers AI and D-3331110.
The air in the hotel felt electric.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
“Talk to me,” I said to Jo. For the second time that day a prickling sensation rippled up and down my skin. That feeling I get when a case starts to break wide open.
“Patents,” Jo replied, leaning close from her seat next to me. “Standard format. Patents typically have seven digits and some prefix. 0 stands for a utility patent. X denotes patents dating prior to 1836. RE is a reissue and so forth.” Jo pointed at the file. “D stands for design. AI means additional improvement.”
“Additional improvement on the initial design?”
She nodded. “Probably - given that the series of numbers in both is the same. Eddie, what do these patents have to do with your case?”
“I don’t know yet. Can you tell from the numbers what the patents are for or when the initial design or the additional improvement was made?”
“Medical research,” Jo said after a quick check of her own on the public registry for patents. “Awarded to a Dr. Lee. Patents are valid for twenty years from the filing date. In the U.S., whoever made the invention first, and can prove it, is awarded property rights for those twenty years.”
“Why would a blood spot, a genetic partial prelim, be tied up with a design patent?” I asked. “A human genome’s not an invention.”
“Now I have proof you don’t listen to me,” Jo said with a groan. “It was briefly outlawed about thirty years ago, but that changed about the time gene editing for humans was approved: around 2029. Genetics are one of the hottest areas of intellectual property.”
“You can patent somebody else’s genome?”
“Only a part of it,” she said. “The part that would be useful as a building block for basic research in the field. Patent holding companies sequence the genes and convert them to another form called cDNA. Then a patent is sought on the cDNA rather than the gene itself.”
“That’s a shell game, isn’t it?”
“Not if you’re the one who put all the time and resources into discovering the useage.” She shrugged. “It’s common practice, and it’s legal.”
“So other scientists would have to pay the patent owner licensing fees every time they used your research to further their own.”
“That’s right,” Jo said.
“How much money are we talking for a licensing fee?”
“Depends,” she said. “If you have the rights to a common diagnostic, that can mean serious money over time. For example, back in 2001, an American company got a European patent for BRCA1.”
“The breast cancer gene?”
Jo nodded. “That company can and does charge a substantial fee to test people in order to determine whether or not somebody carries the mutation that virtually guarantees cancer down the line. Six figures is a low estimate on value.”
“But a big motive,” I said, “for murder.”
Britney’s partial prelim had the D-3331110 identifier, so that had to be the original design. Since Lee’s name was on the registration for the patent, the scientist had evidently patented part of that genome for his work on AlzX. And his encrypted file with the AI prefix must hold an improvement of some kind. What was the improvement? A diagnostic that predicted the onset of the disease, or some form of resistance to it?
I leaned over and kissed Jo then activated my phone. “This is big, Jo. Thanks.”
It was four o’clock. As Jo went to shower first, I put in a call to Lee’s boss, Maclaren. What patents did Lee’s Alzheimer’s X research entail, how much money was involved, and most important, what happened to the patents now that he was dead? Maclaren would know. Unfortunately, it also seemed to be the day that everybody I wanted to talk to was out of the office.
I called Shin again, and updated him on what Jo had said about the patents. Shin listened with interest. “Okay,” he said, his holo-image nodding. “I’ll pass it along to Vice.”
“Don’t,” I said, pulling up Lee’s vlog on the hotel’s giant wall screen.
Shin shot me a look. “Why not?”
“We’re not done with the case. Salazar’s statement is a web of lies.” The home invasion by Salazar and Ramirez had slowed me down, but my brain was starting to come back online, thoughts skipping ahead. The thing I’d forgotten, the important thing nagging at me since the hospital had finally inched its way back to me. “About Lee’s vlog.” I pointed to the image on the wall screen. “Look at the timestamp, Shin. If my shooting the Ramirez kid was the trigger for everything the Aztekas did to me and to Dr. Lee, how could Lee have mentioned my name a week before the shooting happened?”
Shin’s eyes grew rounder. “Why would Salazar corroborate AzteKa involvement?”
“Sleight of hand,” I said. “He put the blame on a dead man.”
“Send me the whole vlog,” he said. “ASAP. I’ll go see the captain as soon as I’ve watched it.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The patents gave us both a new potential motive and hard evidence that linked Lee’s research to the blood spot I’d found in Britney Devonshire Bible. Both deaths were tied up in this mess that led back to Piedmont Sr. and the Aztekas. Maclaren could help me sort out what the patents meant to Lee and his heirs. But, since his company had an inherent interest in that research, it would be good to know as much as possible about Lee’s work beforehand.