“I went to a Huntington’s support-group meeting several months ago, here in San Francisco. They told me three people who belonged to their group had died in the last two years.”
“Well,” said Helen gently, “it is a fatal condition.”
“They didn’t die from Huntington’s. They were murdered.”
“Oh.”
“Would the police have done any special investigations of that?”
“Three people belonging to a single group getting killed? Sure, we’d have checked that out.”
“I’m the fourth, in a way.”
“Because you went to one meeting? What were you doing, giving a talk on genetics?”
“I have Huntington’s, Helen.”
“Oh.” She looked away. “I’m sorry. I’d…”
“You’d noticed my hands shaking when I gave you the tour of my lab.”
She nodded. “I—I’d thought you’d had too much to drink at lunch.” A pause. “I’m sorry.”
Pierre shrugged. “Me, too.”
“So you think somebody has something against Huntington’s sufferers?”
“It could be that, or…”
“Or what?”
“Well, I know this sounds crazy, but the person could actually think they’re doing the Huntington’s sufferers a favor.”
Helen’s thin eyebrows rose. “What?”
“There was a famous case in Toronto in the early 1980s. It was everywhere in the Canadian media. You know the Hospital for Sick Children?”
“Sure.”
“In 1980 and ’81, a dozen babies were murdered in the hospital’s cardiac ward. They were all given overdoses of digoxin. A nurse named Susan Nelles was charged in the case, but she was exonerated. The case was never solved, but the most popular theory is that someone on the hospital’s staff was killing the babies out of a misguided sense of mercy. They all had congenital heart conditions, and one might have concluded they were going to lead short, agony-filled lives anyway, so someone put them out of their misery.”
“And you think that’s what’s happening to the people in your Huntington’s group?”
“It’s one possibility.”
“But the guy who tried to kill you—what’s his name…?”
“Hanratty. Chuck Hanratty.”
“Right. Wasn’t Hanratty a neo-Nazi? Hardly the type known for humanitarian gestures—if you could even call something like this humanitarian.”
“No, but he was doing the job on orders from somebody else.”
“I don’t remember seeing anything about that in the report on the case.”
“I—I’m just speculating.”
“Mercy killings,” said Helen, trying the idea on for size. “It’s an interesting angle.”
“And, well, I don’t think it’s just Huntington’s sufferers. Joan Dawson—she was the secretary for the Human Genome Center—was murdered, too. The police said the same kind of knife that was used in the attack on me was also used in killing her. She was an elderly diabetic, and she was going blind.”
“So you think your angel of mercy is offing anyone who is suffering because of a genetic disorder?”
“Maybe.”
“But how would this person find out? Who would know about you and—what’s her name?—Joan?”
“Someone we both worked with—and someone who had also spoken to the Huntington’s group.”
“And is there such a person?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“I’d rather not say—not until I’m sure.”
“But—”
“How long do you keep tissue samples from autopsies?”
“Depends. Years, anyway. You know how court cases drag on. Why?”
“So you’d have samples from various unsolved murders committed in the last couple of years?”
“If an autopsy was ordered—we don’t always do one; they’re expensive. And if the case is still unsolved. Sure, samples would still be around somewhere.”
“Can I get access to them?”
“Whatever for?”
“To see if some of them might have been misguided mercy killings, too.”
“Pierre, I don’t mean to be harsh, but, well…”
“What?”
“Well—Huntington’s. It does affect the mind, right? Are you sure you’re not just being paranoid?”
Pierre started to protest, but then just shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. But you can help me find out. I only need tiny samples. Just enough to get a complete set of chromosomes.”
She thought for a moment. “You ask for the damnedest things, you know.”
“Please,” said Pierre.
“Well, tell you what: I can get you the ones we’ve got here. But I’m not going to go calling around to other labs; that would raise too many eyebrows.”
“Thank you,” said Pierre. “Thank you. Can you make sure that Bryan Proctor is included?”
“Who?”
“That superintendent who was murdered by Chuck Hanratty.”
“Oh, yeah.” Helen moved over to her computer, tapped some keys. “No can do,” she said after a moment. “Says here a tenant heard the gunshot that killed him. That fixed the time of death exactly, so we didn’t take any tissue samples.”
“Damn. Still, I’ll take anything else you can get for me.”
“All right—but you owe me big-time. How many samples do you need?”
“As many as I can possibly get.” He paused, wondering how much he should take Helen into his confidence. He didn’t want to say too much, but, dammit, he did need her help. “The person I have in mind is also under investigation by the Department of Justice for being a suspected Nazi war criminal, and—”
“No shit?”
“No—which explains the neo-Nazi connection. And, well, if he murdered thousands fifty years ago, he may very well have ordered a lot more than just the handful we know about murdered today.”
Helen thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do. But, look, it’s almost Christmas, and that’s our busiest time for crime, I’m afraid. You’re going to have to be patient.”
Pierre knew better than to push. “Thank you,” he said.
Helen nodded. “Uh-huh.”
Two months later.
Pierre hurried in the back door of the house. He’d given up fighting the steps to the front door a couple of weeks before. It was 5:35 P.M., and he went straight for the couch, scooping up the remote and turning on the TV. “Molly!” he shouted. “Come quickly!”
Molly appeared, holding baby Amanda, who, at eight months, had acquired even more rich brown hair. “What is it?”
“I heard just as I was leaving work that the piece on Felix Sousa is on Hard Copy tonight. I thought I’d be home in time, but there was an accident on Cedar.”
A commercial for Chrysler minivans was coming to an end. The Hard Copy spinning typewriter ball flew out at them, making that annoying thunk-thunk! as it did so; then the host, a pretty blonde named Terry Murphy, appeared. “Welcome back,” she said. “Are blacks inferior to whites? A new study says yes, and our Wendy Di Maio is on the story. Wendy?”
Molly sat down next to Pierre on the couch, holding Amanda against her shoulder.
The image changed to some historical footage of the UCB courtyard behind Sather Gate, with longhaired flower children strolling by and a bare-chested hippie sitting under a tree, strumming a guitar.
“Thanks, Terry,” said a woman’s voice over the pictures. “In 1967, the University of California, Berkeley, was home to the hippie movement, a movement that preached making love not war, a movement that embraced the family of man.”
The image dissolved to modern videotape footage shot from the same angle. “Today, the hippies are gone. Meet the new face of UCB.”
Walking toward the camera was a trim, broad-shouldered white man of forty, wearing a black leather pilot’s jacket with the collar turned up and mirrored aviator sung
lasses. Pierre snorted. “Christ, he’s even dressed like a storm trooper.”
The reporter’s voice-over said, “This is Professor Felix Sousa, a geneticist here. There’s no peace in the wake of his research—and no love for him on the part of many of the university’s staff and students, who are branding him a racist.”
The shot changed to Sousa in one of the chemistry labs in Latimer Hall, beakers and flasks spread out on the counter in front of him. Pierre snorted again; he’d never once actually seen Sousa in any lab. “I’ve spent years on this research, Miz Di Maio,” Sousa said. His voice was crisp and cultured, his enunciation meticulous. “It’s hard to reduce it to a few simple statements, but…”
The picture cut to the reporter, an attractive woman with a wide mouth and mounds of dark hair. She nodded encouragingly, urging Sousa to go on. The picture changed back to Sousa. “In simplest terms, my research demonstrates that the three races of humanity emerged at different times. Blacks appeared as a racially distinct group some two hundred thousand years ago. Whites, on the other hand, first appeared one hundred and ten thousand years ago. And Orientals arrived on the scene forty-one thousand years ago. Well, is it any surprise that the oldest race is the most primitive in terms of brain development?” Sousa spread his hands, palms up, as if asking the audience to use its common sense. “On average, blacks have the smallest brains and the lowest IQs of any of the races. They’ve also got the highest crime rate and the most promiscuity. Orientals, on the other hand, are the brightest, the least prone to criminal activity, and the most restrained sexually. Whites fall right in the middle between the other two groups.”
The picture switched to footage of Sousa lecturing to a class. The students—all white—seemed rapt. “Sousa’s theories don’t stop there,” said the reporter’s voice over this. “He’s even suggesting that the old locker-room myths are true.”
They cut back to the interview tape. “Blacks do have bigger penises than whites, on average,” said Sousa. “And whites are better endowed genitally than Orientals. There’s an inverse relationship between genital size and intelligence.” A pause, and Sousa grinned, showing perfect teeth. “Of course,” he said, “there are always exceptions.”
Wendy Di Maio’s voice-over again: “Much of Sousa’s work echoes older, equally controversial studies, such as the research made public in 1989 by Philippe Rushton [still image of Rushton, a surprisingly handsome white man in his mid-forties], a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and the conclusions in the contentious 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve [slide of the book’s cover].”
An outside shot: Di Maio walking across the campus in the courtyard between Lewis and Hildebrand Halls. “Is it right that such obviously racist research is going on in our publicly funded institutions? We asked the university’s president.”
The camera panned up to what was presumably supposed to be the president’s window, but his office was actually clear across the campus from there. Then it switched to a close-up of the president in an opulent, wood-paneled room. His name and title were superimposed at the bottom of the screen. The elderly man spread his arms. “Professor Sousa has full tenure. That means he has full freedom to pursue any line of intellectual inquiry, without pressure from the administration…”
Molly and Pierre watched the rest of the report, and then Pierre clicked the OFF button. He shook his head slowly back and forth. “God, that pisses me off,” he said. “With all the quality work going on at the university, they pick crap like that to highlight. And you just know there are going to be people who think Sousa must be right…”
They ate dinner in silence—Stouffer’s lasagna done up in the microwave for them (it was Pierre the gourmet’s turn), and Gerber apple baby food for Amanda. At eight months, she had acquired a very healthy appetite.
Finally, after Molly had put Amanda to bed, they sat at the dining-room table, sipping coffee. Molly, growing concerned by Pierre’s quiet, said, “A penny for your thoughts.”
“I thought you could take them for free,” said Pierre, a little sharply. His expression showed that he immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. Forgive me. I’m just angry.”
“About…?”
“Well, Felix Sousa, of course—which got me to thinking about that paper he and Klimus did a few years ago for Science on reproductive technologies. Anyway, thinking about that paper got me thinking about Condor Health Insurance—you know, this business of financially coercing the abortion of imperfect fetuses.” He paused. “If I wasn’t already manifesting symptoms of Huntington’s, I’d cancel my policy in protest.”
Molly made a sympathetic face. “I’m sorry.”
“And that stupid letter Condor sent me—what patronizing crap, from some flack in the PR department. A complete brush-off.”
Molly took a sip of coffee. “Well, there’s one way to get a little more attention. Become a stockholder in Condor. Companies are usually more responsive to their stockholders’ complaints because they know that if they aren’t, the questions might be raised in person at their shareholders’ meetings. I took a course in ethics back at UM; that’s one of the things the prof said.”
“But I don’t want to support a company like that.”
“Well, you wouldn’t invest a lot.”
“You mean buy just one share?”
Molly laughed. “I can see you don’t play the markets much. Shares are normally bought and sold in multiples of a hundred.”
“Oh.”
“I take it you don’t have a broker, right?”
Pierre shook his head.
“You can call mine: Laurie Lee at Davis Adair. She’s great at explaining things.”
Pierre looked at her, startled. “You really think I should do this?”
“Sure. It’ll increase your clout.”
“What would a hundred shares cost?”
“That’s a good question,” said Molly. She headed down to the den, and Pierre followed her, holding carefully to the banister to help keep his balance on the short flight of stairs. Sitting on a desk was a Dell Pentium computer. Molly booted it up, logged on to CompuServe, scurried down a couple of layers of menus, and pointed to the screen. “Condor closed today at eleven and three-eighths per share.”
“So a hundred shares would cost—what?—eleven hundred and…and…”
“Eleven hundred and thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents, plus commission.”
“That’s a fair piece of change,” said Pierre.
Molly nodded. “I suppose, but it’ll all be liquid. You should be able to recover almost all of it, if you decide to sell later on. In fact…” She tapped some more keys. “Look at that,” she said, pointing at the table that appeared on screen. “They’ve been climbing steadily. They were at just eight and seven-eighths this time last year.”
Pierre made an impressed face.
“So we might even end up making money when you eventually sell the stock. But, for the time being at least, Condor will have to take you seriously.”
Pierre nodded slowly, thinking it over. “Okay,” he said at last. “Let’s do it. How do I proceed?”
Molly reached for the phone. “First, we call my broker.”
Pierre pointed at the clock. “Surely she won’t be in this late.”
Molly smiled indulgently. “It may be eight P.M. here, but it’s noon in Tokyo. Laurie has a lot of clients who like to play the Nikkei. She could very well still be in.” Molly touched a speed-dial key. She was obviously very much into this; she had mentioned her investments in the past, but Pierre had never quite realized just how conversant she was with the field. “Hello,” she said into the handset. “Laurie Lee, please.” A pause. “Hi, Laurie. It’s Molly Bond. Fine, thanks. No, not for me—for my husband. I told him you were the best in the business.” Laughter. “That’s right; anyway, can you take care of him, please? Thanks. His name is Pierre Tardivel; here he is.”
She held the handset out for Pierre. He hesi
tated for a moment, then brought it to his ear. “Hello, Ms. Lee.”
Her voice was high-pitched, but not grating. “Hello, Pierre. What can I do for you?”
“Well, I’d like to set up an account so that I can buy some stock.”
“Very good, very good. Let me just get a few personal details…”
She asked for information about his employer, and for his Social Security number (which Pierre had to consult his wallet to determine, having only recently received it).
“Okay,” said Laurie. “You’re all set. Was there anything you wanted me to buy for you now?”
Pierre swallowed. “Yes. A hundred shares of Condor Health Insurance, please.”
“They’re on the California Stock Exchange; I won’t be able to place the order until tomorrow. But as soon as the exchange opens, I’ll get you one hundred C-H-I Class B.” Pierre could hear keyclicks. “You know, that’s an excellent choice, Pierre. A very excellent choice. Not only has that stock been doing well on its own—it’s very close to its all-time high, which was set just two weeks ago—but it’s also done significantly better than its competition in the past year. I’ll send you confirmation of the purchase in the mail.”
Pierre thanked her and hung up, feeling quite the entrepreneur.
Three weeks later, Pierre was working in his lab. The phone rang. “Allo?”
“Hi, Pierre. It’s Helen Kawabata at the SFPD.”
“Helen, hi! I’d been wondering what had become of you.”
“Sony, but we’ve been swamped by that serial-killer case. Anyway, I’ve finally got together some tissue samples for you.”
“Thank you! How many did you get?”
“A hundred and seventeen—”
“That’s terrific!”
“Well, they’re not all from SF; my lab does forensics work on a contract basis for some of the surrounding communities, as well. And some of the samples are several years old.”
“But they’re all unsolved murders?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s great, Helen. Thanks so much! When can I come and get them?”
“Oh, whenever—”
“I’m on my way.”
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