Lee-Ann gave him a syringe loaded with a mixture of lidocaine to dull any pain reflexes and epinephrine to contract blood vessels. Through the Ioban film, Latham injected a small amount of this liquid into the child’s scalp. He then made a one-inch scalpel cut through the Ioban into the tissue beneath.
Lee-Ann handed him a mastoid retractor, which he used to spread the wound. He deepened the incision with a Bovie, a scalpel that cauterizes blood vessels as it cuts, producing a dry field with clear visibility. With the acrid smell of cauterized tissue still hanging in the air, he repositioned the retractor and went to work again with the Bovie.
As much as Lee-Ann despised Latham, she could not dismiss his skills. He might have the morals of an animal, but he was a great surgeon.
“Midas.”
Lee-Ann gave him the Midas Rex, the skull drill, which he quickly used to create a dime-sized burr hole filled with wet bone oatmeal in the child’s skull.
“Saline.”
With the transfer pipette Lee-Ann handed him, he washed the oatmeal from the hole and resumed drilling. Finally, he reached a pulsating white membrane—the dura—the tough fibrous covering of the brain.
He opened the dura with two deft scalpel cuts in the shape of a cross, then touched the incision with the bipolar cautery, a tweezer-like instrument that sealed any nearby blood vessels and caused the edges of the dural wound to contract.
Able now to see the rolling white contours of the brain, he touched the bipolar cautery to its delicate blood-vessel-filled covering. He moved the biopsy probe into position.
The probe was a tube within a tube. At the bottom of both tubes was a small rectangular window. With the core tube turned so its window did not coincide with the window in the sleeve, he inserted the probe into the child’s brain to the desired depth. He then turned the core so its window and the outer window were superimposed.
Using a syringe attached by a plastic connector to the core, he created enough suction to draw a small plug of the child’s brain through the two windows into the core. With the capture complete, Latham turned the core so its window was closed, severing any remaining tissue connections between the child’s brain and the plug.
He withdrew the probe from the brain, removed the core from the sleeve, and handed it to Lee-Ann, who discharged the plug of tissue into a test tube of culture medium fortified with all the factors that would make the next steps possible.
Lee-Ann glanced contemptuously at the gas passer they always worked with. His lack of intellectual curiosity was disgusting. It was almost incomprehensible that Latham had done this under his nose so many times without him understanding what he was witnessing. In his defense, though, it hadn’t exactly been easy to figure out. It had taken a long time, but she’d done it. Latham still wasn’t aware of all she knew.
She handed the core back to him, and he reassembled the probe for another sample from the same site. They would repeat the entire procedure on the other side, and one more child would go back to her parents “cured.” But if Seminoux was where she needed to be, this might be the last one.
EVEN WITH LAPLANTE pushing the Cessna to its maximum airspeed, it didn’t roll to a stop at Louis Armstrong Field in New Orleans until ten after twelve. Sarchi was immensely relieved when LaPlante cut off the engine, giving her back her hearing.
“Let’s get that rental car and go,” John said, throwing his door open. He hopped to the pavement, turned, and offered his hand to Sarchi.
“Mind if I come along?” LaPlante said, joining them.
“By all means,” John said. “We have no idea where we’ll be going after the hospital, so we should stick together.”
From the moment they left the Cessna, it felt to Sarchi as though some malevolent force was speeding up time and holding them back. From where they’d landed, they could see the rental car lot beyond a distant chain-link fence. But it took their driver nine minutes to get them to it. During the ride, Sarchi tried to call Sharon. As she had that morning, she started with Sharon’s cell phone, then tried Sharon’s home number, but still got no answer.
Inside the rental car office, there were two people ahead of them and only one clerk, a dark-haired woman with her head bent over a map, helping an old woman who looked like she shouldn’t be out by herself.
“The best way to go is to take Airport Drive to I-10, then pick up 610 first chance you get,” the clerk said. “That’ll take you to the other leg of I-10, avoiding this loop.”
“Will it be easy to see the signs to 510?” the old woman said.
“Not 510, it’s 610, like it shows right here,” the clerk said patiently. “And all the signs are huge.”
“What if I should have car trouble?”
“I’m sure you won’t.”
“But what if I do?”
As the precious minutes slipped away, and the old lady kept coming up with questions, Sarchi’s anxiety could barely be contained. Finally, just as she was considering removing the old lady by force, the woman left on her own.
She was replaced by an efficient-looking man dressed in a blue suit and carrying an attaché case. He gave the clerk his name and waited for her to check his reservation. After dithering at her computer awhile, the clerk looked at the guy with an expression that made Sarchi close her eyes and pray she wasn’t going to say—
“I’m sorry sir, but I don’t have any record of your reserving a car.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” the guy said.
Sarchi felt like getting the gun from her bag and demanding a car—now. At twelve thirty-five, with Sarchi in despair over the time lost, they finally left the lot with her behind the wheel of a four-door Toyota Camry. Even LaPlante, who was by nature an optimist, believed the short cut the rental agent had shown them on the map wouldn’t get them to the hospital by one o’clock.
33
AT TWELVE FIFTY, ten minutes before the courier was to arrive, Lee-Ann set aside a small sample of the tissue Latham had removed from Karen Owens’s brain. She put the tube containing the rest into an insulated container filled with ice. She then took the set-aside down to the lab for the usual PCR analysis.
That test would take approximately three hours. The lab would then call Latham with the results, and he would relay them to the courier’s destination, which was another thing Latham wasn’t aware that Lee-Ann knew. If the inactivation reaction had taken place as expected, the final procedures would be set in motion. If something had gone wrong and the gene insert was still functional, a great deal of time and money would have been wasted. But this presumption of success was the best way to provide the group on the other end with the freshest possible cells.
With the samples safely delivered to the lab, Lee-Ann hurried back upstairs to meet the courier. As usual, he walked through the door precisely on time, wearing the same gray suit as always.
Lee-Ann was most relaxed around those as homely as she pictured herself. The courier fit that criterion. Even if he had not lost most of his hair, his low ears and soaring forehead would have made him an anatomical curiosity.
“Hello, Charles,” she said. “It’s good to see you again.” Along with all the other things she’d learned, she knew his name was not Charles. But she was always careful not to reveal that.
“You’re looking well,” Charles said. “Is that mine?”
She picked up the red-and-white insulated container beside her and gave it to him. “See you next time.”
Charles nodded and left.
Lee-Ann gave him a few seconds, then stepped into the hall and hurried in the opposite direction. At the first window she reached in the east wing, she looked down at the hospital’s main entrance, where the courier’s cab was waiting. She saw no one who resembled Sarchi Seminoux. Maybe she was waiting for him in the lobby, or in one of the hundreds of cars in the parking lot.
TWO MILES AWAY, Sarchi was trapped behind a tractor trailer rig loaded with new Fords. In the outside lane, she was pinned by a flatbed truck carrying a huge yellow pipe fitting.
CHARLES RODE THE elevator down to the first floor and headed for the front entrance. Near the information desk, he paused at a water fountain, then, deciding that a hospital was no place to drink from a public facility, he resumed walking.
SARCHI LET UP on the gas, immediately drawing an angry horn blast from the car behind. As soon as there was a car’s worth of daylight between her and the rear of the truck carrying the big pipe fitting, she checked the mirror and made a hard left, swerved across two lanes, and pushed the accelerator to the floor.
She shot past the rig with the Fords and was then in the clear. Where was that exit for the hospital?
CHARLES ENTERED THE waiting cab and settled in his seat, the insulated container nestled beside him. On the way over, he’d told the driver where they’d be going after the hospital, so there was no verbal exchange between them before the cab pulled away. The cabbie made a big loop around the first row of cars in the parking lot and headed back to the divided drive that led out.
TIRES SLIDING SIDEWAYS, the Camry turned into the hospital entry at five after one. Afraid they’d missed him, Sarchi’s eyes searched the hospital’s front entrance for their target. On the other side of the line of crape myrtles that separated the two lanes of the entry, the cab with Charles in the back passed them.
“Hey,” John said. “There’s a bald guy in that cab.”
What to do now? There were lots of bald men in the world. Was this the right one? Maybe the man they were supposed to follow was late. They might run after the wrong man and miss the right one. In the mirror, Sarchi saw the cab turn onto the frontage road.
What to do?
FROM THE WINDOW in the East Wing, Lee-Ann was very disappointed. Charles’s cab had left, and no one had followed. The tip she’d given Seminoux had been wasted.
But then, the car that had come in as the cab left suddenly speeded up. It quickly made the same loop the cab had, then went back to the frontage road and gave chase.
God was still on her side.
SARCHI FOLLOWED THE cab onto the Westbank Expressway, heading back the way they’d come. “I hope this isn’t a big mistake.”
“We’ll know when he gets out,” John replied.
Sarchi glanced at him. “What if he is the right guy, and he’s supposed to leave the insulated container in the cab? We’d never know then if we’re right.”
“You supposed to follow the container or the man?” LaPlante said.
“The man, I guess,” Sarchi replied.
“Then you follow him when he gets out whether he has the container or not.”
They tailed the cab across the Huey P. Long Bridge and onto Airline Highway, where it turned toward the airport.
“What if he doesn’t have the container and he gets on a plane? How committed are we to this guy?”
“If either of you are thinkin’ we could beat him to his destination in the Cessna and pick him up as he gets off his flight, forget it,” LaPlante said. “Our top speed is 130 miles an hour. A commercial jet cruises at 600.”
“Maybe he isn’t even going to the airport,” Sarchi said.
Fifteen minutes later, the cab turned into the airport.
“It’s possible he won’t get on a plane,” John said. “Who or what we’re supposed to see could be in the terminal. So either way, with or without the container, we’re going to follow him inside. Danny, you park the car, then come inside and wait for us at the United counter.”
Hanging back so there were a few cars between them, Sarchi tailed the cab to the second entrance. When the cab stopped and the back door opened, she and John leapt from the car.
At first it wasn’t visible, but when the bald man turned to go inside, Sarchi and John saw a red-and-white insulated container in his left hand.
They followed him inside and stayed well behind while he studied the American Airlines arrival and departure information on a bank of overhead monitors. He then moved off, heading toward concourse C. As they passed the monitors, Sarchi looked up, hoping the one he’d looked at was for arrivals.
It wasn’t.
“He’s taking a plane out of here,” Sarchi hissed. “What are we going to do?”
“I’m working on it,” John said.
As they approached the security checkpoint and the bald man entered the queue, John pulled Sarchi aside. “I’m going to follow him to his departure gate. I could probably get my gun through by showing them my police ID, but I don’t want to risk being delayed or draw attention to myself.” He pulled her around so they faced the wall, and he handed her his 9mm automatic. “Hold this for me while I see where he’s going.”
As soon as his gun was out of view in Sarchi’s bag, John hurried to the shortest line at the security check, where ahead of him, the bald man was just about to enter the metal detector.
In less than a minute, both men disappeared into the crowd choking the concourse.
With her adrenaline pumping from the chase, it was nearly impossible for Sarchi to simply stand by and do nothing. There were so many people coming and going, she wasn’t even able to pace. When she thought she couldn’t stand it another second, she saw John coming back fast.
“He’s going to Chicago,” he said, reaching her and pulling her along with him as he headed back into the terminal. “There’s only one seat left on the flight, and they’re already boarding, so we don’t have time to discuss this.”
“You’re going to get a ticket for that seat?”
“I’ll follow him. You stay here and check on Sharon.” He took out his key ring and removed the key for the truck. “Whenever you get back, take the truck to your house. I’ll call you as soon as I learn anything.”
They bought the last ticket for the flight to Chicago, and John asked for his gun back.
“What if they won’t let you past the checkpoint with it?”
“Then we’ll adjust.”
John approached the metal detector with his badge and his ID out. He conferred briefly with the security contingent, and they let him pass. He waved to Sarchi and sprinted for the plane.
Still harboring a flicker of hope that Sharon would suddenly reappear, Sarchi called her again. As before, Sharon’s cell phone went unanswered. But after just two rings, the phone in Sharon’s apartment was answered without the accompanying hiss of the tape on her machine.
She was home. “Sharon, are you—”
“Who’s speaking, please?” a man’s voice asked.
“Sarchi Seminoux. I’m a friend of Sharon McKinney. Is something wrong? Who are you?”
“Detective Veret, homicide. I’m afraid your friend is dead.”
Hearing her worst fears confirmed, Sarchi grew so limp with despair the phone nearly slipped from her hand.
“Sorry to have been so blunt,” Veret said. “But if I had phrased it more delicately, it would only have misled you into believing there was still hope.”
Sarchi’s mind was an abyss that didn’t hear a word of Veret’s apology.
“Doctor Seminoux. Are you there? Doctor Seminoux . . .”
Realizing that the only way she could help Sharon now was through Veret, Sarchi choked out an answer. “I’m here.”
“Steve Oakley said you sent Sharon to a place called Tropical Joe last night, and then called him later saying you thought she was in trouble. I’d like to discuss that.”
“I’ve certainly got a lot to tell you, but it’s too complicated to get into by phone.”
“Where are you?”
“The New Orleans airport.”
“When did you get here?”
“This morning. In a pri
vate plane.”
“How long are you staying?”
Hating the city for all the trouble it had brought her, Sarchi suddenly wanted to be as far from it as she could get. “Only long enough to help you.”
“Have you got a car?”
“Yes.”
“How about we meet in twenty minutes at the Holiday Inn at Causeway Boulevard and I-10?”
“I’ll need some directions.”
“Take Airline to Causeway, hang a left, and keep your eyes open. Whoever gets there first will get us a quiet table in the restaurant where we can talk. How will I recognize you?”
Sarchi felt like saying she’d be the one who looked like shit because I killed my friend. Instead, she said, “I’m fiveseven with short black hair, and I’m wearing a black turtleneck sweater and jeans.”
“On my way.”
Sarchi hung up and went to find LaPlante, who was watching a shapely blonde check her bags at the United counter. “I was about to have you paged,” he said. “Where’s John?”
“On his way to Chicago with the guy we were following.”
“Are we through here then?”
“Not quite.” She wasn’t in the mood for a lot of supposedly comforting platitudes regarding Sharon’s death, so she decided not to mention it. “I’m supposed to meet a detective in twenty minutes at a Holiday Inn nearby.”
“You sure live a more interesting life than I do.”
“Right now, I’d trade you even. Anyway, when I finish with this guy, we can go home.”
SARCHI HAD NEGLECTED to ask Veret what he looked like, so when they walked into the Holiday Inn restaurant, she had no way of knowing if he was already there. But no one even looked at her.
“Guess we got here first,” she said to LaPlante.
“Why don’t I get a table by myself,” he suggested. “That way you two can have some privacy.”
“I appreciate that.”
The hostess wanted to put both of them at tables near those already occupied, but Sarchi insisted on one in the center of the room, where she took the seat facing the entrance.
The Killing Harvest Page 27