Sacrifice

by Farris, John

  "It certainly was a unique experience. Anyway, she's—her liver failed, and it seems to be a matter of days."

  He just looked at me, thoughtfully. "I'll say a prayer for her."

  The telephone rang. Greg looked at it as if trying to think of a good reason not to answer it. Decided to answer.

  "Oh, hello, Adrienne." He leaned against a bookcase, rubbing his head, suppressing impatience. "Doing as well as can be expected. I took your suggestion and called Jean Maxwell. I know, it's a terrible real estate market, but I've made up my mind. Jean's listing the house at one sixty-nine. No, we're not including the furniture. Would you like to talk to Sharissa?"

  From the kitchen Sharissa called, "Tell Grammer I'll call her back when this stupid paper's done!"

  Greg couldn't get off the phone. He looked at me and shrugged. I got up and glanced around the den, wandered out into the hall. Greg was still talking, with great forbearance, to Caroline's mother. I walked up the stairs, casually, just having a look around.

  The master bedroom door was open. A lamp was on by the bed. A framed photograph of Caroline Walker, probably taken when she was in her twenties, graced the bedside table. There was a small black bow pinned to one corner of the frame. I looked at her portrait for a few moments, feeling both sad and a little ridiculous for having intruded to this extent. The tentative way Greg moved, carried himself, the tone of his voice—there was no denying that Greg Walker was in a painful state of mourning. But I had a theory to test, ridiculous or not. I went into the bathroom, closing the door behind me.

  The bathroom was large enough for separate walk-in closets, an alcove for a makeup table. Filigreed gold-colored tray with cosmetics on it, a woman's spiky hairbrushes—nothing of Caroline Walker's had been disturbed. Greg's part of the bathroom was almost as neatly maintained. Beside the basin there was a folded hand towel with military-style hairbrushes and a comb on it. The cap was on the toothpaste tube, which was rolled up from the bottom. Greg was neat, conservative, methodical, a man who thought before he spoke, and he took good care of his smallest possessions, or his necessities. But he hadn't cleaned his hairbrush for several days.

  I took a small Ziploc sandwich bag from my coat pocket and pulled a few strands of hair from between the bush bristles, sealed them in the bag. Then I used the toilet.

  When I came out of the bathroom, the toilet flushing behind me, Greg was standing in the hall doorway, watching me.

  "All that cider," I said. "Hope you don't mind my using your bathroom."

  "No."

  He stepped aside for me, and followed me downstairs. "Central America," I said. "That won't be dangerous, will it? I mean, for somebody like Sharissa."

  "There's always some danger in primitive places. Particularly where the governments are unstable. Guatemala, for instance. But the spiritual rewards certainly outweigh the risks."

  I wasn't so sure, but then I wasn't big on religion either.

  Greg paused in the foyer, a hand on the front door handle, obviously wanting to let me out. I could see a part of the kitchen past the dining room, Sharissa hunched over the table where she was writing. Staring at the back of her head, I felt pleasantly paralyzed, thinking of the closeness we had enjoyed not so long ago, and craving her attention now. I could easily have stayed all evening, watching over Sharissa, if time—and her father—had been that accommodating.

  "See you, Sharissa," I called.

  "Come for dinner some night," she said, not turning around.

  "You bet," I said, but it hadn't been much of an invitation. I looked at Greg and held out my hand. "Hope to see you before you go. When will that be?"

  "January. After Sharissa finishes her exams." For a couple of moments there was something in his eyes that might have been curiosity or speculation. "There's nothing else about the Sullivan woman?"

  "How do you mean?"

  "Did she—well, I wonder if she ever admitted that she'd made a mistake, imagining that I was—"

  "No. From what I've been told, she went into a coma without saying a word to anybody. By the way—"

  "Yes?"

  "You don't happen to remember what it was you said to her, just before—the gears in her head froze up."

  Greg frowned. "It wasn't anything I said. I explained this, didn't I? I rolled back my sleeve and showed her my right forearm. Her husband—Frederick—had a bad scar there, from a sawmill accident. When she saw that I was unscarred—she reached for me, and then—as soon as she touched me, I could almost feel the vitality, the desperation—that had driven her so far, draining out of her. All that was left was the terrible kind of panic that leaves you hung up in a void. You can't hear, see, feel, reason." He shuddered slightly. "I was like that—not right away, but a week or so after Caroline was killed. I mean I felt it coming on, like a massive shock to the nervous system. I read Psalms. Again and again. Until it passed, and the danger was over."

  I stepped out to the veranda. He didn't come outside with me. In the yellow light beside the door I studied his smooth, apparently unblemished forehead. It seemed to me there'd been a trace of scars there from the accidental GSW, the last time I'd seen him. But he nodded and smiled good-bye and closed the door before I could be sure.

  One of the guys I work with had to take emergency leave and go up to Kentucky where his mother was suffering from Alzheimer's and his father had been hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer. He sold me a pair of Hawks tickets he wouldn't be able to use and I called a buddy of mine from high school days, a bachelor like me. We met outside the Omni on Friday night. The Bulls were in town, a sure sellout.

  We had great seats, mid-court, six rows up. I bought Dan a beer and one for myself. There was plenty of time to get caught up before the game started. Dan was a microbiologist. He worked for one of the country's larger biotech companies over in Norcross, on stuff he was usually not allowed to talk about. They also did some of the more difficult trace evidence analysis for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

  The Bulls blew the Hawks out; afterward we had ribeyes at Bone's. I paid. Dan was impressed with my generosity.

  "I need something done," I told him. "I'm working on it unofficially, and I can't go through channels."

  He nodded, and I got out my hair samples: hair that I suspected was from the head of one Frederick Sullivan, whereabouts unknown, and the hair I'd removed from Greg Walker's brush at his home three nights ago. He looked the samples over without taking them from the Ziploc bags.

  I said, "The sample marked 'A' is at least twenty years old, maybe older than that. The other is very recent. I think it's the same man. But I need a DNA match to prove it."

  He lit a cigarette and moved the baggies around, shaking one of them, studying the hair samples.

  "Don't think we can do it."

  "You guys are supposed to be miracle workers. What was that you were telling me, getting a match from as little as forty sperm? That's not enough to show up on the head of a pin."

  "Okay, but this is different. DNA-coding works best with blood and tissue samples. Exhibit A here, this lock of hair has been cut. Unlikely we'll find an intact follicle. We need DNA from follicle tissue, not the hair shaft. Probably the best we can do is establish that the same class characteristics exist between the two samples of hair."

  "Which doesn't rule out coincidence."

  "I'm afraid not. If A and B are the same guy, can you tell me what you want him for?" I must have looked tense. "Complicated business?"

  "Well, if B is the same as A, he should be in his seventies now, and he doesn't look a day over forty-five. His worst crime may be bigamy. He would have abandoned a wife in Canada almost twenty years ago, changed his identity, remarried here in Georgia, raised a daughter. Can't blame the guy for wanting to change, I met his first wife. But what bothers me, aside from the sheer improbability of his not aging visibly over a period of twenty years, is the fact that A had a teenage daughter with him when he left Canada. Now, if it was me and I wanted to change my n
ame and my life and settle down a long way from Canada, then I don't think I'd want to take my daughter with me. Not without a good reason. Was A afraid the girl would be abused by her mother? Was that one of the reasons for splitting in the first place, to protect the girl? If so, what happened to her? Has he been in touch with her, all these years? No answers. I don't have anything to go on. But cop sense tells me something is really wrong here. And I'll tell you another thing—how about a second bottle of that Sicilian red?"

  We stayed late over the wine. And I tried to lay everything out for Dan's analytical mind, all the jagged pieces that wouldn't, no matter how I arranged them, make a coherent picture.

  "B is planning a big change in his life right now. Kind of an eerie similarity in pattern. I don't mean he's going to disappear, change his name—but he and his daughter, they're leaving for Central America in January to act as lay missionaries for the Baptist church. His wife was killed in an accident on I-75 in August, and—I didn't tell you about that."

  "No."

  "She died maybe an hour later from massive internal injuries. B was in the car, too. Dislocated shoulder, that was the extent of his injuries."

  "Lucky man."

  "Lucky? Less than two months earlier, he survived a gunshot wound to the head. Survived, hell. He came back so quickly it was like he shrugged it off."

  "I can see why you're—fascinated with him."

  "You mean obsessed. Call it what it is. Daniel, I don't want him to leave town. I just don't want him to leave Sky Valley with Sha—with his daughter, until I know a hell of a lot more about him."

  Dan looked at the hair samples again. "I'll see what I can do. But—if B is not who he's claimed to be all these years, then there has to be a phony paper trail, doesn't there? Can't you nail him that way?"

  "I can't conduct the kind of investigation you're talking about without suitable grounds. He's not charged with anything, he's not a suspect in an open case. It's more difficult to pull off now, but twenty years ago there was no trick to establishing an ID that would pass all but an FBI security clearance check."

  We drank some more in silence. The Dago red made me sweat, and I was slightly manic. And I talked too much, finally.

  "Bonnie. Sharissa. Both girls about the same age. Where's Bonnie now? And why does he want to take Sharissa away? She could enroll in college, come January. But he wants her to go with him. What the hell am I—"

  I stopped, but I didn't have to fill in blanks for Dan. After a while he said, "A girl named Lourdes came to work for us, three—almost four years ago. She was from Costa Rica, but she went to school in the States. Little bitty thing. Black hair to her waist, and these incredible turquoise eyes. Nineteen years old. I couldn't even talk to Lourdes, I was that crazy about her. A year ago she got married, to an anthropology professor at Emory. But that didn't change anything. I can't get interested in another girl. You know how you meet someone and that's it, she's perfect?" I nodded, glumly. Dan said, sad but adamant, "There'll never be another girl like Lourdes." Daniel is six-three, bones like soda straws. Thick glasses. Women pay more attention to a discarded sofa on the street than they do to men like us.

  It was our fate, and we drank silently to it, and I drove home, mostly sober, worrying, more than a little bathetic. Who is your father, Sharissa? For her sake, I had to find out. Without arousing Greg's curiosity and maybe his suspicion of me.

  That struck me as being particularly important. There was something about Greg Walker that was closed, guarded, even dangerous.

  For the next couple of weeks I was busy, and on overtime, as part of an enforcement team playing tag with drug dealers. The game goes like this: we bust a dealer, and he's "it." Then it's one-to-fourteen unless he cooperates and hands us his supplier. We tag that one, who then becomes "it," gradually moving up the chain of informants, hoping for a big coup: a major regional distributor. But when you run into a dealer who's stubborn or stupid or scared to woof, the game ends, and you start over.

  I was enjoying a day off, too pooped to do anything but drink beer and watch a not-very-interesting NFL game, when Daniel called.

  "The hair thing?" he said. "Pretty much the way I told you it would go. No DNA match possible."

  I yawned. My father was sitting by the fire, talking to the cat in his lap. My mother had gone to bed. "Thanks for trying, Dan."

  "I did turn up something interesting."

  I sat up straighter and put the TV on mute. "What?"

  "Well, it was obviously a lock of hair trimmed by scissors, but a small curved pair, like manicure scissors. Maybe his wife snipped his hair for a keepsake while he was sleeping. Used little sharp pointed scissors."

  "So?"

  "She drew some blood, apparently. Nipped an ear, or something. Tiny little drop. He might not even have felt it. I sorted through all the hairs in the sample, four hundred eighty-four by actual count. Three of them were stuck together with what I thought might be dried blood. So I did a Leucomalachite Test. It was human blood, all right."

  "You should have been a policeman, Daniel."

  "Not with my sensitive digestion. Anyway, not to make all of this overly technical, with degraded material like dried blood we go through a process called a polymerase chain reaction to amplify the fragments of DNA from the blood cells. That gives us the so-called DNA blueprint. We match it with the DNA we took from cells in subject B's hair follicles. The result was a high level of specificity."

  My skin was prickling. "How high?"

  "Well, you know, a lot of baloney has been written about the statistical probabilities of DNA matching. It's not an exact science. There hasn't been enough research on population frequencies, for one thing. Small homogeneous population groups can yield a high number of matches, as many as two out of five."

  "But in our case—" I interrupted.

  "—That wouldn't be relevant. And three of us concurred on the reading. So—ruling out the possibility of identical twins, A and B are the same man. Hope this does you some good. I'll put the autorads in the mail first thing tomorrow, along with the standard forensic report."

  I thanked Dan and hung up. My head was seething. I stared at the gas log flames until both Blacky the one-eyed cat and my father felt the drawing power of my gaze and looked around at me. I went into the kitchen then and mixed myself a sour mash and soda.

  So that was it. Frederick Sullivan and Greg Walker, one and the same. And now that I knew, what was I supposed to do with the information? Mrs. Roxanne Sullivan had passed away, unmourned, on the twenty-second of November. Frederick Sullivan was not wanted for anything, I knew that much. Did Greg Walker have someone else's birth certificate? Probably. Did he have a criminal record? Not in Sky Valley, where he'd made his home for the past eighteen—almost nineteen—years. He was an imposter who had lived a decent, hard-working life. Unlike Frederick Sullivan. He'd attended church regularly, joined the usual merchants' civic clubs, raised a daughter, made no waves.

  Would Sharissa care that her father had been someone else in Canada?

  What would be the point of telling her?

  Well, Holmes. The facts are most remarkable and dramatic. But their meaning is, I confess, damnably obscure.

  I had another sour mash, not much soda this time.

  Uncanny, I thought. That was the word that summed up my feelings about Greg Walker. He had demonstrated remarkable powers of recovery from devastating injuries.

  And in twenty years or more he showed little or no signs of aging. From photos I had seen, evidence of his true age based on Roxanne Sullivan's testimony, he was an exceptionally robust seventy-three. Or older. I had heard of hard-working peasants in favorable environments in remote places of the earth who lived on goat cheese or yogurt or something, and who achieved very long, active lifespans. Biologically Greg Walker might be a genetic rarity, but if that's all he was, then it was no business of mine.

  But my cop sense wouldn't allow me to leave it alone. There was still a loose end that bothere
d me. Her name was Bonnie Sullivan. I wanted to know where she was, what had happened to her. Only her father could tell me that.

  It took me a while to accept what I had to do. Simple enough. You want answers, you ask questions. And I had a real itch to discover what Greg Walker would say when I confronted him with the fact that I knew he was Frederick Sullivan.

  In a way I was cornering him. Challenging his plausibility. He had been consistently plausible since the day I'd met him at the hospital. It's a trait all complex psychopathic personalities have in common. They are the world's best liars. And some of them are killers. I decided I wasn't going to take any chances with Greg Walker.

  By then it was five days before Christmas. When I tried to call the Walker house to invite Greg to lunch, I found out the phone had been disconnected. Greg had already left Sky Valley, taking Sharissa with him.

  SHARISSA'S NARRATIVE

  PART FOUR

  Cobían, Guatemala

  I have a new friend, I think. Her name is Veronica. She goes everywhere I go. She walks with a slight limp and carries an Uzi semi-automatic rifle.

  Dad thinks it's necessary. There has been renewed anti-government guerrilla activity in this part of Guatemala, although nobody seems to make much of it. Last night we heard gunfire again, a lot of shooting; it went on sporadically for five or six minutes across Lake Petén-Itzá from the hotel. Also we heard rumors that some tourists were detained on the main road to the ruins by the FAR—the armed rebel forces. All the rebels stole was some gasoline, which is sometimes hard to come by up here. Nobody got hurt.

  Anyway, Veronica is a first cousin to the man who operates the Itzá Maya, Mr. Colon. She's short, about five-three, but otherwise doesn't resemble most of the Maya girls you see in Cobían, who run to chubby and are shy but good-natured. They smile a lot. Veronica never smiles. Not that she's disagreeable. And the spiderweb of scars on the right side of her face doesn't really detract from her looks. I didn't know until today how she got the scars. Didn't know she spoke more than a few words of English, either, although I thought it was a good bet she understood more English than she was willing to let on about. I found out she spent two years in a Catholic girls' college in California (Mount San Antonio). Also, surprise, she's older than she looks, about twenty-eight, and was married. Her husband had something to do with the government; he was killed by the FAR three years ago. That gave us something in common to talk about, once Veronica decided it was worth talking to me at all. And I found that I really did want to talk about Bobby, because the hurt just won't go away.