Luke threw the towel in a corner and grabbed a green scrub shirt from one of the cabinets.
“Let’s go.” He pulled the baggy green top over himself as he and Ben walked out of Trauma One.
“Escort this doctor out of the building!”
It was Barnesdale, and he was standing in the corridor with a pair of hospital guards flanking him. He pointed at Luke like a monarch ordering a beheading.
Luke looked from one guard to the other. The shorter one standing to Barnesdale’s left shrugged apologetically.
Ben erupted in a fit. “Well excuse us all to hell, you jackass! Do you have any idea—”
“Is there a problem?” someone down the hallway asked.
Everyone turned.
Detective O’Reilly walked toward them, his left hand holding out a badge for the guards to peruse. In his right hand were what looked like a pair of CD or DVD cases. The cover of the outermost case contained the University Children’s insignia.
21
“And you’re certain you left the hospital at 10:05 on Friday night?” O’Reilly asked.
“I wasn’t looking at my watch,” Luke said, “but that sounds about right.”
The questions had started as soon as O’Reilly pulled him away from the confrontation with Barnesdale. The cop had offered to drive Luke home—he wanted to hear Kate’s phone message, he said—but by the time they reached the hospital lobby, their conversation had become yet another inquiry into Luke’s whereabouts and movements on the night of her murder.
There was something conniving about the detective.
“And then,” O’Reilly said, “you walked across the street to Kolter’s Deli where you were supposed to meet Dr. Tartaglia at ten-fifteen.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t drop by your office, or stop to talk to anyone, on your way over there. Right?”
“That’s right.”
“In fact, you showed up at the restaurant a few minutes early.” O’Reilly nodded at his own observation as they passed through the exit doors. “And that matches what the restaurant owner told us. He remembers you walking in while he was making change for a customer, and the only register transaction between ten and ten-twenty had a time stamp of ten-thirteen.”
Luke stopped suddenly. “What’s your point, Detective?”
O’Reilly took another step before breaking his stride and turning back to Luke. In an awkward motion the detective stuffed the thin, plastic cases with the University Children’s insignia into his right-side coat pocket while pulling a notepad from his left pocket.
“Well, I walked from your emergency room to Kolter’s this morning.” The cop flipped open his notebook. “It took me four minutes and twenty-seven seconds. That leaves a little over three and a half minutes that I’m trying to account for.”
“Are you telling me that I’m a suspect?”
“Just trying to account for everybody’s whereabouts, Doc. Chasing after the little details—that’s ninety percent of my job. I’m sure you can understand that.”
“How many of the people you deal with account for every minute of their time?”
“Most people don’t. That’s a fact.”
“You can count me among them.”
Luke figured the plastic cases in O’Reilly’s coat pocket contained DVD-video recordings from the hospital’s security cameras, but until that moment he had wrongly assumed the homicide investigator wanted to examine the segments that showed Kate being carried into the E.R.
O’Reilly was going to use the videos to pinpoint the moment Luke had left the hospital.
Luke pointed at O’Reilly’s right coat pocket. “Detective, why don’t we talk about this after you look at those videos? That is, if you have any more questions at that point.”
The cop let a small smile play at the corners of his mouth while scanning his notes, as though acknowledging Luke’s deduction.
O’Reilly asked, “What about that e-mail she sent you? You ever find it?”
“Not yet. Someone in our MIS department is searching for it.”
The detective pointed at a plain blue sedan along the curb. “Let’s go.”
They were nearing the car when Luke tried to shift the conversation to his discoveries at the Coroner’s Office. “There’s something—”
The detective’s cell phone was against his ear almost as soon as the first ring tone had faded. “Yes?”
O’Reilly was circling around to the driver’s side when he stopped dead.
“He what?” the detective shouted.
Luke turned to find the cop’s eyes locked on him.
The man’s imperturbable mask was gone, replaced by a scowl.
“The answer is no!” O’Reilly flipped his phone closed without saying good-bye. His stare remained fixed on Luke.
“You wanna explain what the hell you’re up to?” he said.
Luke was still trying to decipher the question when O’Reilly pressed on: “At some point, were you planning to tell me about your little trip to the morgue to see Dr. Tartaglia’s body?”
“Kate wasn’t the reason I went there. At least, not directly.”
O’Reilly showed him a doubtful expression.
“And you’d already know about my visit to the morgue if we hadn’t spent the last five minutes rehashing my movements on Friday night.”
The door locks popped up. “Get in,” O’Reilly said.
As soon as they were seated inside the car, the detective gave him an okay-let’s-have-it look.
Luke gave him a brief summary of the past two days: Josue Chaca’s death and its aftermath; the lingering questions that prompted Ben’s call to the coroner; the eerie similarities between Jane Doe and the boy; and how, against any reasonable probability, Kate’s name had turned up in connection with the dead girl.
But he didn’t tell O’Reilly about Ben’s planned testing of the girl’s tissues, figuring the cop’s first instinct would be to seize the evidence and sequester it. Until Luke had a better read on the detective, he wasn’t going to risk that possibility.
“If I’m right about Friday night,” Luke argued, “if Kate was coming to talk about one or both of those children, then I think the timing of her murder is awfully suspicious.”
O’Reilly looked out at the street for several seconds. When his gaze finally returned to Luke, the detective was shaking his head.
“What are you doing, Doc? You trying to run your own investigation here?”
“I’m trying to find some answers, Detective.”
“That’s my job. With all your education, I’m sure you’re smart enough to know that there’re laws against interfering with a police investigation.”
“I haven’t interfered with—”
“It’s not too often that people I question in a murder investigation ask to see the autopsy report of the murder victim. It’s even less often that they tamper with physical evidence by examining the body.”
“I didn’t touch the body. Ask the medical examiner.”
“Believe me, I will.”
Luke stared at traffic for a long moment, waiting for the tension to dissipate.
It didn’t.
“I’m not trying to get in your way, Detective. This whole thing started because I wanted to know why a patient of mine died. Doesn’t the fact that it led back to Kate Tartaglia seem odd to you?”
O’Reilly turned over the engine. “This Guatemalan boy—”
“Josue Chaca.”
“Yeah, him. Was that the kid that died about the same time you got into the fight with Lloyd Erickson?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
The detective regarded him for a moment. “I interviewed Dr. Barnesdale this morning. He told me about your suspension.”
“So?”
“Well, I understand there’s a question about that boy’s death, something about a delay in treatment. Dr. Barnesdale seems to think you were knocking heads with Erickson when you sho
uld’ve been busy saving that boy’s life.”
A surge of anger reached out and grabbed Luke like an unseen riptide.
“Did Barnesdale also happen to tell you that he signed the papers that prevented us from doing an autopsy? If he’s so concerned about why that boy died, ask him why he did that.”
“Ever occur to you that he may not wanna know? Maybe he was saving your ass, and his hospital, from a lawsuit.”
“That’s not why he—”
“Doc, unless you’re ready to tell me that kid was murdered, I don’t really care why or how he died. I conduct homicide investigations; that’s what I do. Whether you screwed up or not with that kid isn’t my concern. Neither is the bad blood that seems to exist between you and Barnesdale. But anything you do that interferes with my investigation is my business.”
O’Reilly glanced at his rearview mirror and then pulled into traffic.
“Doc, you’re playing in the wrong game here. Stay clear of my investigation.”
• • •
“What was I supposed to do?” Barnesdale said. “Tell the detective that he couldn’t have the security videos?”
“You could have put him off for a day, called your attorneys, wrung your hands about patient confidentiality—whatever,” the Zenavax CEO said. “At the very least, you should’ve talked to me before handing over those videos.”
Barnesdale wasn’t going to tell the CEO how he had almost heaved his breakfast when security paged him to the lobby, telling him that an LAPD homicide detective was there looking for him.
“What did you give him?” the CEO asked.
“Exactly what he asked for. He wanted recordings from two of our security cameras—the lobby, and a corridor that leads to the E.R. I don’t understand what harm that could do.”
“That’s the problem,” the CEO said. “There are too many things you don’t seem to understand.”
After Barnesdale hung up the phone, several seconds passed before the realization blew through him like a sudden wind.
His hospital’s security cameras held secrets that had unsettled the CEO.
He had a weapon.
• • •
“So where’s her message?” O’Reilly asked.
“I don’t know,” Luke said, “but it was here this morning. I checked.”
They were standing in Luke’s entry hall with the front door still open, staring down at his message machine. There was a 0 showing in the SAVED MESSAGES display. Luke pressed the playback button again.
Nothing happened.
“Did you change tapes?”
“It’s a digital machine. There are no tapes.” He showed the detective a mask of calm, but his temper was flaring. Someone had invaded his home.
“You think, just maybe, you could’ve erased it?” O’Reilly asked the question like a parent leading his stubborn child to the inevitable conclusion.
“That’s not what happened. Somebody else erased it.”
Luke walked the length of his short hallway, peering into the kitchen and then his bedroom before returning to the entry. Anyone with the inclination could easily have broken into the seventy-year-old structure, but a thief would have taken the machine—not erased its messages.
“Any sign of a forced entry?” O’Reilly asked.
“Nothing obvious.”
The cop had undoubtedly noticed that his TV and computer sat undisturbed in the living room.
O’Reilly scratched his head in an exaggerated manner. “I was never very good at riddles, Doc. You wanna let me in on how you think that message disappeared?”
There were only two possible explanations, and both seemed utterly implausible. Erickson’s P.I. could have accidentally erased the message while snooping around Luke’s apartment, but what could the guy have been hoping to find? Given the kind of money that Erickson could afford to pay, it didn’t seem likely that he’d hire an investigator who was both reckless and stupid.
The other possibility brought back the disquiet that had visited him several times in the past few days.
But how could anyone have even known about her voicemail? And why would anyone, even Kate’s killer, risk burglarizing his apartment to erase a message that contained little more than a passing mention of some e-mail that never got to its recipient?
Neither explanation made any sense, and Luke’s credibility with O’Reilly was already stretched to the point that it probably would not withstand the shock of another bizarre-sounding theory.
“I don’t have an answer to your question, Detective. But there’s one thing I’m certain of—when I left here this morning, Kate’s message was still on that machine.”
O’Reilly blew out a long, slow breath while staring at the voicemail recorder. “You mind if I borrow this thing for a few days?”
“Go ahead.”
Luke figured his machine was going to spend the next few days on a lab bench where forensic technicians would try to recover the erased file containing Kate’s message.
As soon as the detective left, Luke was going to engage in his own search and retrieval mission. Whoever erased Kate’s phone message did so without leaving any conspicuous signs of a break-in. People with those kinds of skills could also tap a phone line or plant a listening device.
22
The microbiology lab had always reminded Ben of a temple—its rows of lab benches lined up like pews, butane flames burning like candles, techs wearing hairnets in place of skullcaps. Invariably, though, the sanctified atmosphere would dissipate as he reached the far end of the lab, where its would-be high priest, Elmer McKenna, resided.
Ben knocked on the door frame as he entered the older man’s office.
“Be with you in a minute,” Elmer said, his back to Ben, his tone a swirl of distraction. He was bent over his credenza, peeling away layers of paper from a sloping mound of documents, searching for something.
From the looks of things, whatever he was hunting for might take hours to find. Waist-high piles of computer printouts formed a battlement along the walls of his office, and his desktop—covered with medical journals, stacks of unopened mail, and a half-eaten crumb roll—looked like the termination point of a landslide.
“I’ll come back later,” Ben said.
Elmer turned suddenly. “Oh, Ben. No, no, have a seat.”
Ben lifted a pile of medical charts off a chair and sat. “What are you looking for?”
Instead of answering, Elmer pulled a Post-it note from his computer monitor and read it. “Uh-oh. I forgot to call Medical Records.”
“I’m sure they’re as shocked as I am,” Ben said. “Listen, I need to ask you about Kate Tartaglia.”
“Oh.” Elmer’s eyes suddenly came into focus. “What a horrible thing that was, what a tragedy.”
“Yep.” Ben allowed a moment, then said, “Actually, Luke wanted to come himself and talk to you about this, but he managed to get his keister booted out of the hospital. So I’m here in his place.”
Luke hadn’t given him an explicit instruction to visit Elmer, but that’s how Ben interpreted his friend’s remark when, as Luke was walking away with the detective, he called back: “Say hi to my dad when you see him.”
“What sort of a mess did my son get himself into this time?”
“It’s a long story, but it’ll blow over,” Ben said. “Listen, we were hoping you might know what Tartaglia was involved in at Zenavax. What sorts of projects was she working on?”
“The last time I talked with Kate was the day she quit her position here. But the infectious diseases community is pretty small—things get around. Why are you asking?”
“Luke and I think she may have known something about two deaths we’re looking into.” Ben gave Elmer a sketchy synopsis and explained how Kate’s name had turned up in connection with the dead girl.
Elmer nodded. “Luke asked me to check if I’d received any e-mails from Kate. Does this have anything to do with that?”
“Bingo.” Ben gave him a
n expectant look.
“Well, she didn’t send any messages to me.” Elmer scratched his nose. “You know, sometimes my son has a way of making things more complicated than they are.”
“Maybe so, but I think these deaths are worth looking into. One of the cases—the boy—came from our clinic in Guatemala. Can you think of any link between Zenavax and Guatemala?”
“Malaria.”
“As in malaria vaccine?” Ben asked.
Elmer nodded.
“You gotta be kidding,” Ben said. “Zenavax is working on a malaria vaccine too?”
Elmer’s malaria vaccine project was well known to everyone at the hospital, in part because his approach was so unorthodox—turning mosquitoes into allies by using them to administer the vaccine to humans. The idea wasn’t likely to catch on anytime soon in economically privileged regions like North America and Europe, but among developing countries with small budgets and high mortality rates from ongoing malaria epidemics, the prospect of malaria-fighting mosquitoes was seen as a godsend.
The medical basis for Elmer’s vaccine was elegantly simple, and scientifically daunting. He had set out to create a genetically modified version of the ubiquitous Anopheles mosquito—one that was inherently resistant to harboring malaria parasites and endowed with saliva glands that produced a malaria-like protein. The altered female mosquitoes would inject the protein while feeding on their human prey. To work, the protein had to fool the human immune system into believing that it was being attacked by the real thing—a malaria parasite.
Initially, most thought Elmer’s quest a fool’s errand. That is, until he, Caleb Fagan, and Dr. Kaczynski, the now-deceased geneticist with whom they worked initially, proved their hypothesis with primates.
That was five years ago. Now, after successfully completing human testing, Elmer and his Chinese partners were gearing up to produce and deploy his mosquito in quantities sufficient to meet the already vigorous demand for his creation.
“Zenavax hasn’t formally announced their malaria vaccine project, but like I said, word gets around. Rumor is that they’ve just recently started testing it.”
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