Flawless

by Joshua Spanogle

  93

  I HELPED TIM INTO THE backseat, though he didn’t much need it, hopping like a monkey over the leather upholstery. In the distance, sirens had taken up a chorus.

  “Put on your seatbelt, Tim,” I said, in some lame attempt to regain the moral, child-protection high ground. Thankfully, the kid didn’t call me on it.

  “Did you see it blow up?” he wanted to know as he buckled himself in.

  “No,” I said.

  “It was loud, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was almost like you could feel it in your stomach. Even when I was down there, I could feel it.”

  “It was loud, that’s for sure.”

  Ravi drove slowly now, but everything else was happening fast, fast, fast.

  “I almost crushed the kid,” Ravi muttered, irritated. We were driving next to Golden Gate Park. A fire engine raced in the other direction, its yammering and squawking pressing down on us, then fading.

  “He’s all right.”

  “Freaking ankle-biters,” he said. I twisted around to see Tim scowling.

  “You got to let it go now. The kid had to use the bathroom. It was break-the-rules day.”

  Ravi shook his head. “Thirty gallons of gasoline—a fucking bomb, man. And I beat the shit out of some guy, nearly crushed a kid. What a day.”

  “Watch the language,” I said, tilting my head toward the backseat. “That’s the least of his worries.”

  It was an annoying observation, but unfortunately true.

  “Not so stealthy, were we, McCormick?”

  “No,” I agreed, half listening to him, half figuring out what to do next. Dragon East and Cellegix Solutions. Uncle Tony. And the thawing, sweating tubes of whatever crap was now in my pockets. Ten disfigured people. Eleven, counting Dorothy.

  Ravi laughed, seemed to be rediscovering some of the bluster he left back in Spectacular Nails. “Hyfrecator salesmen? That’s fantastic.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I took out the bill of lading. Dragon East. Cellegix.

  “You think they’re scared now?” Ravi asked, unconcerned with what I’d pulled from my pocket, his brain still preoccupied with the previous hour.

  “Yes. Unfortunately.”

  “Why unfortunately?” Ravi asked. “They’ll shut down operations. No more sarcoma.”

  “They can open another clinic tomorrow. Or you’re right and they’re going to close shop for good. Either way, it’s not great for us.”

  “Why not?”

  I glanced into the backseat, saw Tim Kim watching me. “Because there are too many loose ends they need to cut,” I said.

  94

  I HAD RAVI CIRCLE BACK toward the Richmond so I could retrieve Dorothy’s car. We parked a good distance away from it—five blocks or so—on a side street. Then I pulled out the plastic tubes again. The three different tubes—green-topped, orange-topped, the flip-top Tim had found—rolled in my hands like a heroin fiend’s bounty.

  “From the freezer?” Ravi asked.

  “From the trash. And one that was dropped when they cleaned out the freezer. Tim found it.”

  I concentrated on what Tim had found. Inside the tube was a gelatinous substance. It surrounded what looked like a little pink jellyfish.

  “It’s tissue,” I said. The liquid nitrogen in the shotgun lab made sense now. They were taking biopsies—those tiny snips of tissue—and flash-freezing them. “It’s a biopsy.”

  “Biopsy? Where’s it coming from?” Ravi asked.

  “Coming from the clinic. Going where, I don’t know.”

  You get a biopsy for one purpose only: to analyze it, to see what’s going on.

  “We’ll want histology on this,” I said, dropping the tube in the console between us.

  “What’re those?” Tim’s seatbelt was off and he was scrunched forward between the two front seats, pointing at the green-and orange-topped tubes in my hand.

  “That’s what we took from the trash,” I said.

  “Can I see?”

  “May I see. Sure.” I handed him one green and one orange. He stared at them like they were diamonds. “What’s histology?” he demanded.

  “It’s the morphology of the…It’s the way cells look under the microscope.” To Ravi, I said, “Get immunohistochemistry on the biopsy, too, if you can.”

  “Immunohistochemistry for what?”

  “Try CD34. I bet—”

  “What’s immnochemistry?” Tim wanted to know.

  Christ, Bio 101 again. “Immunohistochemistry is a way to find types of cells in tissue. Ravi, try CD34 to look for DFSP—”

  “How?” Tim interrupted.

  “How what?”

  “How do you find the cells?”

  Ravi was scowling. He had less patience for this than I did. But, as they say in med school, there’s always time for a teaching point. “We use antibodies to find proteins that are unique to different cells in the body. The antibodies are like puzzle pieces. They only fit certain proteins, which means they only fit certain cells.”

  I waited for another question, but Tim was still chewing that over. “Why would they have biopsies in the clinic?” Ravi asked.

  “Dorothy said they took tissue. I’d guess they’re culling it from everybody.”

  “It doesn’t make sense that they would keep the tissue.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Unless they’re—I don’t know—monitoring what’s going on.”

  “That’s a little much to ask of a bunch of criminals, isn’t it?”

  I was having the same trouble as Ravi, making a case that Uncle Tony and his bunch cared much about the biology of what they were doing to these patients. Cellegix, perhaps. But the bill of lading showed the shipment from Cellegix to Dragon East, not the other way around. Cellegix sent something; it didn’t receive it.

  “What about these?” Ravi gestured at the other tubes, the ones with green and orange tops.

  “I’d be willing to bet a year’s salary one of them is Beautiful Essence.”

  “You got no salary, you unemployed bum.” Ravi held the green-topped tube to the light. “Fountain of Youth, huh? No idea what it is?”

  “None.”

  “Needle in a haystack. I hate that.” Ravi uncapped the tube, sniffed at it. “I’ll see what we can scrape from the inside of these things, then shotgun it with a protein microarray, see if we—”

  Tim piped up, “What’s—”

  “A microarray is a way to look for a lot of different proteins at once,” I said. “A bunch of antibodies that capture proteins are put on a little chip—Ravi, how big’s your microarray?”

  “Five thousand, I think.”

  “Tim, you have five thousand different antibodies that are like jigsaw pieces and they’re stuck on a tiny chip. You take your substance—like the stuff in these tubes—and tag all of it with a fluorescent marker. You dump all of that on the chip. If something in the substance you’re interested in finds its corresponding jigsaw piece on the chip, it gets stuck there and lights up. Then you know what it is. You understand that?”

  “No,” Tim said.

  “I’ll draw you a picture,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “After you’re in college.” I turned back to Ravi. “Get to the lab, man. Find the needle in the haystack.”

  Tim and I walked along the street toward his mother’s car. The boy fell into step with me, intent on lengthening his strides to match mine. “You put protein on a chip?” he asked, his eyes on his feet.

  “A silicon chip. It’s very complicated.”

  We got through half a block before Young Einstein opened his mouth again. “What’s a fluorescent marker?”

  “Something that lights up. Like a glow stick. Quiet now, I have to do something important.”

  I pulled the bill of lading and my cell from my pocket. Cellegix Solutions sported a 617 area code. Boston. I checked my watch. Four p.m. East Coast time.

  When the switchboard answered, I asked to be
put through to sales. Ten seconds later, I found myself talking to LaTonya.

  “I’m wondering if you have an item in stock,” I said. I gave her the lot number from the bill.

  LaTonya came back on the phone and cheerily let me know they did, in fact, have the item in stock. “We have aliquots of fifty thousand and one hundred thousand cells.”

  “Cells?”

  “That’s what you’re interested in, right? The fibroblast stem cells?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I’m interested in.”

  I cut the call.

  95

  “WHOA,” TIM SAID, AS WE arrived at the car. The street in front of Spectacular Nails was choked with police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, and, already, TV news vans. It was good to see he had some interest in normal eight-year-old-boy things, and not just in microarrays and other perverse stuff.

  Maybe he had too much interest. He broke from my side and started speed-walking toward the commotion.

  “Tim,” I said, but he was already weaving his way ahead of me along the sidewalk. Truth was, I wanted to see, too. I followed him.

  The crowd thickened, and I caught up to Tim, bent to take his hand. His fingers were cold and wet. Television crews had staked out their territory, positioned themselves so the reporters could be shot with a dramatic backdrop of boiling black smoke and churning men in uniform. Barricades had been set up, a few uniformed cops standing behind them, splitting their attention between the curious masses and the emergency response.

  “Anybody hurt?” I asked, sidling up to a policeman who had to be half my size.

  The cop looked at me warily, then at Tim, and in that moment, I realized I may have just made a crucial mistake. I’d forgotten that I’d “abducted” Tim Kim. How does the child abduction thing work again? How does word spread through the police force?

  I knew I should have gone to law school.

  “I’m a doctor,” I said, by way of explaining away any resemblance I might have to a child molester.

  The cop seemed unsatisfied, but he answered. “Windows blew out. Guy in the shop next door was hurt, a few pedestrians got cut, far as they figure it. We don’t know about the situation inside—” He broke off to listen to the radio squawk on his shoulder. “Not sure if it was a gas line or something—bomb or whatever.” He shook his head. “I mean, if terrorists are blowing up nail salons now…Bastards.”

  “Damn bastards,” I agreed heartily, gripping Tim’s hand before the kid could start an Honest Abe thing and begin explaining what really happened.

  I started to back slowly from the cop. Hurrying away from the scene of the explosion with a boy the cops in four counties were looking for didn’t seem like such a great plan.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw someone standing at the barricade. Peripheral vision isn’t good at details, but I could tell the person was staring at me.

  “Mr. McCormick,” Jack Tang said. Scenes of handcuffs, struggle, me explaining how I’d gotten the kid, jail, fending off advances from a burly cellmate called Tiny, all tumbled through my brain.

  “Mr. Tang,” I said, trying to keep it friendly.

  Instead of shooting me, Tang gestured at my little buddy. “Who’s this?”

  “Uh, this is Teddy, I’m watching him for a friend.”

  Tim protested. “My name’s—”

  “Teddy.” I squeezed his hand, hard. “What’s up, Inspector?”

  “Wanted to ask you the same.”

  Christ, here it comes. I guessed the freaking AMBER Alert had gone out.

  “Look, I can explain,” I said. “It’s not what you think.”

  “Great. Enlighten me.”

  I swallowed hard. “Yesterday, I went out to Berkeley—”

  Tim squirmed, and I realized my fingers were crushing his. “Can I go watch the fire trucks?”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Teddy,” I said.

  “Not every day a kid gets to see something like this,” Tang said. “You remember how much you used to love fire trucks, Uncle Nate?” He smiled at me.

  And I smiled back.

  “Just stay where I can see you, Teddy. Don’t go across the barriers,” I said, responsibility flowing from me like, well, water from a fire hose. “And don’t cross the street.” I watched Tim go, then turned back to Tang. “Why don’t you just ask me what you want to know?”

  “No problem, Doc. The San Mateo folks looked at your friend Murphy’s financial picture. I told you about the big transfers. We didn’t know how big, though. One transfer of a hundred sixty thousand dollars about four months ago, another of over three hundred less than a month ago. Tax records show the guy’s salary was about two hundred K, wife didn’t work. He had interest in the company, but that was never cashed out.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “The monies came from a numbered account offshore, as did the other transfers, the smaller ones. But we don’t know if it was held by Paul Murphy and he was milking it when he needed it, or whether it was held by someone else, who just made payments to him out of it.”

  “No inheritance?”

  “None for him or his wife.”

  “Where did the money go?”

  “That’s the funny thing. Two payments to his parents in Iowa, total over two hundred thousand. A couple other payments to other individuals.”

  “His parents?”

  “Yeah. San Mateo’s tracking them down. Parents seem to be unreachable now.”

  “Jesus.” Wrestling with this new information about Paul, I asked, “So what do you want to know from me?”

  “Since you were his buddy, I want to know if you know anything about why he had nearly a million dollars in his bank account.”

  “No idea.”

  “He had enormous cash flow coming in and you didn’t notice anything different?”

  “We hadn’t…Like I said, I hadn’t seen the guy for years. You said the Mings had big expenditures. They had money. Maybe they were giving some to Murph. Maybe that’s how this was connected.”

  “That was from inheritance. Mrs. Ming’s father died about a year ago. The old man was loaded.” He looked out over the mayhem. “This is not making sense, but I think you’re right, Mr. McCormick. I think they’re connected. Maybe it’s not that the Mings were funding Mr. Murphy, but connected somehow.”

  The urge to divulge all, to bring this guy into the fold, was almost overwhelming. To unshoulder my burden, let Tang and the tax authorities and whomever else take the weight. I mean, what the hell had Murph gotten himself into? And what did I owe him, anyway? My mouth opened, but then I looked over at Tim, up on his tiptoes, clinging to the blue police barrier. I thought of his mother’s body pressed against mine. And I realized I couldn’t chance putting her in more jeopardy.

  “What happened here?” I asked Tang. “You think it was a gang thing?”

  “Gangs, terrorists, gas line.” He shrugged. “You don’t have a cigarette, do you?”

  “No.”

  He shook his head. “This is really going to fuck up my day.” He gave me a hard look. “So, why are you here?”

  “Teddy wanted to check out the pet store on Geary. The kid’s nuts about hamsters.”

  “You’re playing babysitter?”

  “I got all this time on my hands ever since you guys told me to back off for my own protection.”

  From his look, I couldn’t tell if he believed me. “You were saying you went to Berkeley…”

  “To pick up Teddy.”

  “Sure.” Tang sounded doubtful.

  There was a shout at the police line as some onlooker tried to squeeze through the barricade. Lots of Chinese was being spoken. Tang looked back to me. “Well, have fun at the pet store. Let me know if you remember anything about your friend’s bank account.”

  I told him I would, and I watched as he pushed to the barricade, flashed his badge, and placed himself between a big white cop and a red-faced, shouting Asian man. Tang did a litt
le translating, and the man calmed down. Tang made a move to leave, but stopped himself. Instead, he headed toward Tim. My heart sank. He bent and said something to the boy, who looked back at me, then said something in return. Tang shot a glance my way, held it for a second. Then the barrier was pulled aside, and Jack Tang disappeared into a sweating mass of humanity and machinery to tend to his fucked-up day. Tim stayed where he was, watching.

  At the barricade, I reached down to Tim. “Want a boost so you can see better?” He nodded, and I hoisted the boy onto my shoulders.

  “Whoa,” he said, taking in the sights. “They have all these hoses going like crazy. And there’s this guy with blood on his head.”

  “What did that policeman say to you?”

  “He asked if we were going to the pet store.”

  “What did you say back?”

  “I told him I hope so. Are we going to the pet store?”

  “Soon,” I said. I patted his knee.

  With one arm firmly hooked over Tim’s leg, I took out my phone. It was awkward, but I wanted to preserve whatever physical contact with the kid I could.

  I dialed the hospital down south, was put through to the paging office. “Jenna Nathanson,” I said.

  96

  ON THE WALK TO THE pet store, Tim couldn’t quite shake the post–bomb blast excitement. “We were there. We almost got blown to bits.”

  I put the boy down and held out my hand. He didn’t take it. “I can walk by myself,” he said. He appeared to be equally jazzed with having almost been blown to bits, and with the prospect of seeing rodents.

  On the sidewalk outside the store, I could smell the musty odor of animals, their food, and their by-products. I was about to step inside when my phone vibrated.

  “Go poke around,” I told Tim. “But be careful of the kid-eating tarantulas.” I didn’t know if there were any spiders in the place, but I had a theory that looking for them should keep overly curious kids occupied. Tim vanished into the store. I answered the phone.

  “This is Dr. Nathanson,” a slightly peevish voice said. “I was paged.”