Move to Strike

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  “Another surgeon?”

  “Yes. Board-certified, of course. He comes highly recommended. And it was my impression from meeting him that he is more like Bill than I am.”

  “You mean a better salesman?”

  “That’s right. I’m a surgeon and not much good for anything else.”

  Oh, Nina doubted that very much. But the sensible part of her put her tongue on hold while she consulted her notes.

  “Did you know Christopher well?”

  “He grew up hanging around the clinic with his dad. A great kid. Funny. Close to both his parents. Quiet and smart.”

  “Did he have a girlfriend?”

  “He dated now and then, but no. He didn’t settle on anyone. He was only nineteen. Told me once he had to sow his wild oats until he was at least twenty-two.” Brett sighed. “What a waste. And, of course, I can hardly believe the police would arrest Nikki. I remember her coming into the clinic with Chris a number of years ago. The whole story—the knife wounds and so on—it just doesn’t make any sense. I’d like to help any way I can.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that and I’ll tell Nikki. What about Beth Sykes? How well do you know her?”

  “How is she doing?”

  “She’s having a hard time.”

  “Yes, I imagine she is.” He stared out the window for a minute, cleared his throat, and said, “We knew each other, of course. Got together socially. My wife and she were both active in the Friends of the Library group.”

  For the first time, Nina saw the gold ring around his finger. He was married. Good for him. Bad for the women of the world.

  “Tell me your impressions of the marriage.”

  He shrugged. “We were all on good behavior when we got together.”

  “Did he talk about their relationship?”

  “Sometimes. Bill was old-fashioned. Devoted. Protective. Of course, he was older than Beth. The role fit.”

  “What about signs of friction between them? Ever witness any?”

  Only a slight quiver of his heavy lashes betrayed him. “No.”

  “Dr. Brett, your partner was murdered.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re trying to blame Beth?”

  “I’m merely asking you if . . .”

  “Look. In my business, as in yours, discretion is a religion. I don’t like talking about other people.”

  “I understand. And you must understand that we are just trying to find out exactly what happened . . .”

  “No, you’re trying to figure out a way to save your client. And that’s fine. But if I were you, I wouldn’t be wasting my time looking at Beth. She was in LA, wasn’t she?”

  “It’s not just Beth,” Nina said. “It’s Dr. Sykes. I need to understand him. I need to understand his relationships.”

  Looking disturbed, Brett stood up and put his hands in his pockets. He was wearing a white lightweight coat over an open-at-the-collar cotton dress shirt and soft olive-colored chinos. “Some years ago, they had a falling out of some kind. I don’t know any details, I just know he was very upset. There was a phone call . . .”

  “What kind of phone call?”

  “He was talking with Beth. He told her he had decided not to leave her. He would forgive her anything, do anything to keep them together. Actually, it was sweet,” he said firmly. “And since then, things have settled down to normal. That’s all I know.”

  “Do you think she was having an affair?”

  “No idea. I just know there was a lot of emotion tossing around for a while. I was glad when they got through that phase. It was a long time ago. Couldn’t have anything to do with Bill’s death.”

  Nina thought she was beginning to understand Brett better. Messy emotions got those long, lean muscles of his up and running. His comfort zone, she imagined, was basically sterile and predictable, and he liked his toys laid out on a tray, sharp and in order. “You had an equal business partnership?” Nina asked.

  Looking relieved, Brett launched into an explanation of their business agreements which revealed a sophisticated grasp of legal matters and boiled down to an equal partnership. He would have to buy Beth out now, and the details of how that would come about were already spelled out in written agreements.

  Brett had no obvious motive for wanting his partner out of the way. Apparently, these agreements had been in place for many years, and Sykes had been considering retirement. That sounded more like a good reason for Brett to hold tight and watch the clinic become his in the natural course of events.

  “Tell me a little about your practice.”

  Now, relaxed, he flashed a smile, and she held on to the table edge to keep from melting into a puddle. “Between us, we performed about fifteen minor procedures and twenty more major procedures in a week.”

  “Impressive,” Nina said, really impressed and not just working to keep him feeling loose. “Thirty-five patients a week?”

  “Roughly,” he said, holding on to his smile. “Some take only a few minutes, you know. We don’t run people in and out like cattle. We want enough time to make the experience here extraordinary. We want to be available to hold our patients’ hands when they need it.”

  She bet they enjoyed the extraordinary experience of holding Dr. Brett’s large hand. “Did the two of you specialize in one type . . . I mean, did you do mainly faces, for example?” She resisted the urge to run her hand over her cheek at the thought.

  “No, we do everything, although Bill took on the more traditional work when he had a choice. He didn’t go in for some of the newer techniques. Face and neck rejuvenation, body reshaping through liposuction, endoscopic brow lifts, breast enhancements, reductions, and reconstructions, laser skin resurfacing and chemical peels, tummy tucks, thigh lifts, batwing removal . . .”

  “Batwing removal?”

  “Sorry. Some of our patients refer to it that way. That’s slang for removing excess skin from the upper arm. Rhinoplasty . . .”

  “Do you cater mostly to wealthy people?”

  “Not at all,” he said emphatically. “We have clients who save for years for these procedures, or, as I said, take out loans. There’s no reason everyone can’t look wonderful nowadays.”

  Hoping he was not looking at her so intently with an eye toward improvement, she forged on. “Excuse me, but . . . have you . . .?”

  “Lantern jaw,” he said, touching his cleft chin. “Two miles longer than Jay Leno’s. Ears that stuck out. I had those reoriented. Hooded lids . . . Bill did the work. The operations were difficult and he did a good job. The pain and long healing process put him high on my shit list, especially after he broke my jaw. After I finally recovered, I realized that Bill had changed my entire life. Having those experiences made me a better surgeon. I’ll never be as good as Bill was with his patients, but I think I do have empathy, and my patients respond to that.”

  So he had not always been Bondian. Inside he was normal. “Are all your patients pleased with their results?”

  “There’s a lot of subjectivity in this business. Naturally, opinions vary about outcomes,” he said smoothly.

  “Were there any unhappy clients in particular who stand out in your mind?”

  “You’re suggesting one of our patients killed him?” The idea seemed to make him both outraged and nervous.

  “It does happen, doesn’t it, and not that infrequently in your business. I’ve been looking into it. Last year a plastic surgeon in Seattle was killed by a patient . . .”

  “In that particular case, your information is incorrect,” he said. “He was killed by a person who consulted him and who he deemed unsuitable for surgery, who reportedly killed him because he refused to operate.”

  “And I’m sure the clinic has had a few of those. Come on, Dr. Brett. Not everyone walks away happy. And I’m sure you are as concerned as I am about the slashing of Dr. Sykes’s face. Pretty obvious symbolism, it seems to me.”

  “Yes, I did think about that. There is one man I thought about,” he said
grudgingly. “He got through his psychological evaluations with flying colors. It was only much later we realized he was body dysmorphic.”

  “Body . . . what?”

  “It’s a word used to describe people who have major delusions about the way they look. Nothing you do will satisfy them.”

  “Can you tell me this patient’s name?”

  “Stan Foster. It’s in the public record. He had six major surgical procedures and several minor ones, only no matter how well things went, he was chronically displeased. Once we identified his real problem, Bill told him he couldn’t in good conscience do any more surgery. The man went berserk. We had to inform the police about him after he made threats. He sued us for medical malpractice. Eventually, after we paid a lot of lawyers a lot of money, the suit was dismissed. I assume the records would be in the county clerk’s office. But don’t bother to write his name down there,” he said, pointing to her notepad.

  “Why not?” She stopped writing.

  “He was killed in a car crash in March.”

  “Hmm.” That made him an unlikely suspect for a murder that happened in May. “Any others?” she asked.

  “Of course, there were occasional difficulties with patients, but we did our best to alleviate any bad situations. When a patient isn’t satisfied, we generally do whatever it takes to make them happy. It isn’t good for business to have a dissatisfied clientele.”

  “Any other surgeries that stand out in light of Dr. Sykes’s murder?”

  “One other that I—I regret. A young woman named Robin Littlebear who died of a previously un-diagnosed lung ailment. She never recovered from the general anesthesia. Bill handled the surgery. He was very broken up about it. She was the only patient he ever lost. The family sued everybody, of course. Bill was cleared, but I believe he settled a small amount on the family anyway. All of that should be on file, too.”

  “Oh, yes,” Nina said. “I’ve heard about that,” thanks to Sandy, who was setting up a time for her to talk to Robin Littlebear’s mother, Linda.

  “What about Dr. Sykes? The autopsy report showed he had undergone extensive surgery through the years. Who performed that?”

  The smile left him. His surgery was one thing. Other people’s surgery he had a hardcore habit of keeping under lock and key. So intrusive, his eyes said. Not a lady at all. “I did the most recent work.”

  “Would you say he was abnormally concerned about his looks?” Nina asked.

  “Certainly not,” he said, narrowing his devastating gray eyes. “You have to see this from his point of view. Patients come in here wanting to look great. He had to look good, or he would lose patients. End of story.”

  She took a guess. “Was he more concerned about his looks lately, would you say? Worrying about aging?”

  “I couldn’t say,” he snapped, clearly annoyed with her line of questioning. “What could his own surgery possibly have to do with him being murdered? You act like it was Bill that went crazy and killed somebody or something.”

  “It’s very hard to know this early in the investigation what is important,” Nina said. She ventured a second guess. “He had something done recently, didn’t he?”

  “A face-lift. His second,” Brett offered crisply. He looked at his gold Piaget watch. “I’m sorry. I have patients to see.”

  “Is it possible that Dr. Sykes had a compelling need to stay young looking that went beyond his professional requirements? Maybe he did it out of desperation, to keep his young wife?”

  “I would never speculate about that.” He crossed his arms. “Anything else?”

  “Well, yes. You could tell me where you were on the night Dr. Sykes was murdered.”

  “Why, at home, making love to my lovely wife,” he said. He strode to the door and held it open for her. She got up and walked through it. “A pleasure meeting you,” he said coldly, leading her out to the reception area.

  She would have Paul check his alibi, but she certainly could believe he was at home and his wife was fantastically beautiful and was making mad love to him that night, as he had said. What else would a man who looked like that do on a Saturday night?

  Ginger Hirabayashi said, “God, I love this place.” She stood at Nina’s office window, the one that looked out over the lake. “You are so lucky to be here.” She came back and leaned over the desk. “Finished reading?”

  “You’ll have to explain it all to me anyway,” Nina said. “I know I need to become an expert on DNA testing, but the language just doesn’t track for me.” Ginger had come up to talk about the blood evidence in Nikki’s case. A forensic physician with a nationwide reputation and an alternative lifestyle, she was linked in with experts in just about every scientific field.

  “You only have to know enough to ask the right questions,” Ginger said, running her hand over the soft short bristles of her black hair. She had tossed her black leather jacket on the other chair and was wearing a men’s white T-shirt tucked into her jeans. “They have two areas for blood investigation in this case, the samples taken by the police from the crime scene and weapon and Nikki’s blood on the outside wall of the house six inches from the French doors that led into Sykes’s study.”

  “So there’s no doubt it’s Nikki’s blood on the wall outside?”

  “None. A ninety-nine point ninety-nine plus probability of a match there. Hey, Sandy! Bring me some coffee!”

  “Get it yourself,” said the voice from the outer office.

  Getting coffee out of Sandy required a certain tone of voice Ginger didn’t own. Nina said, “I’ll get you some.” She brought back the cup to Ginger, closing the door to her office behind her.

  “She’s thrown you off the mat,” Ginger said. “She reminds me of this sumo wrestler from Samoa I used to go see in Yokohama.”

  “I wouldn’t say that to her face,” Nina said. “So. It’s Nikki’s blood on the wall. And the blood on the sword—”

  “We have only the preliminary report, remember,” Ginger warned.

  “. . . is Dr. Sykes’s blood?”

  “Yes. As we can see from the crime scene photos, it’s all over the floor, too. He bled to death, rather quickly due to the deep gash in his neck, which nicked the carotid.”

  “What about the slashes on his face? His nose . . . is there some way to match the blade to those cuts?” Nina said.

  “They all match,” Ginger said. “It’s obvious that the sword was used to mutilate his face from the general circumstances and also from the autopsy photos. Whether before or after the coup de grace may be hard to establish but it sure makes sense that it happened after he was totally disabled.”

  “You have a funny look on your face. What’s up?”

  “Oh, it intrigues me that the murder weapon was a samurai sword. I know something about them.”

  “I wonder why he fixated on collecting swords, and why he kept this sword in particular,” Nina said.

  Ginger looked at the photograph. “It’s an old and well-kept specimen, and weapon collecting is a huge hobby worldwide. I collect something similar myself. Flutes.”

  “Doesn’t sound similar to me.”

  “But it is. Samurai had a long tradition of converting common objects into weapons. The katana—the sword—wasn’t always convenient to use, so they had other weapons which could be easily concealed but could be quite lethal.”

  Sandy pushed the door open. Seeing that they were still talking, she leaned against the doorjamb, folded her arms, and listened.

  “For example, the tessen, an iron fan. Looked like a fan, but the ribs were iron. And the bamboo flute was the perfect marriage of art and function. According to the story, it was redesigned to be made from the bamboo root, making it longer and stouter like a club so that it worked as a deadly weapon, too.”

  “You have one of those?” Sandy asked.

  “Several.”

  “You scare me, Ginger.”

  “And you scare me, Sandy.”

  “What about the blood on
the sword?” Nina said.

  “I’m getting to the sword,” Ginger said. “There’s nothing in the report you received about a trace sample that didn’t match with the victim. But . . . I have a good friend in that lab in Sacramento that did the initial workup. And for you, Nina, I got a copy of a report your prosecutor’s been holding back. Guess he’s waiting to spring it on you at the prelim. How do you like that?”

  “I love it.” She poised a pen over her yellow pad. “What’s in this purloined report?”

  “There was one blood sample they got from the sword so itty-bitty they managed only one test on it. Here’s the dope on that. This speck definitely does not match the victim’s blood. But . . . and you’re not going to like this . . . they found a similarity to Nicole Zack’s blood.”

  “It was Nicole’s blood?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But usually it’s a definite match or it isn’t.”

  “Problem was, because there was such a preponderance of victim blood on the sword,” Ginger said, “they only had one sample that differed, but the difference appears legitimate. The test shows an unusual third allele on the autoradiograph that matches a sequence also found in Nicole’s blood. In my opinion, that’s not conclusive, but it may be enough for the prosecution experts. They may not agree with me.”

  “Oh. I don’t love that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “So you’re not able to conclude that it’s Nikki’s blood?”

  “Well, it’s this allele problem.”

  “Ginger, talk to me like you do to a kindergartner, okay? What tests did they do?”

  “Okay, a nutshell run-through of PCR, which is short for polymerase chain reaction. When we have a blood sample or biological material like hair from a crime scene, the first thing the lab does is isolate the nuclei from that material. Then they isolate and amplify the DNA found in the nuclei—that’s the PCR part. They take the amplified fragments and separate them using gel electrophoresis. The DNA is transferred onto a nylon membrane, hybridized to labeled probes, washed and used to expose X-ray films, so they can see where the labeled probes ended up. What you get out of this process is an autoradiograph of patterns, kind of like a photograph with supermarket bar codes on it. That’s the DNA pattern, and if you can match it up with a suspect, you are one joyful homicide detective.”