He was in his usual spot but Jordan didn’t even glance at him as he slid into his seat against the wall in the otherwise empty downstairs dining room. He drank a glass of the Côtes du Rhône but didn’t touch the braised oxtail that had appeared as he scribbled a long sequence of As, Cs, Gs and Ts on the paper place mat. Shaking his head, he crossed the sequence out and started again. The waitress, a stylish brunette with an asymmetric bob that reminded Jordan of an old Vidal Sassoon ad, stopped at the table and said, “You don’t like it?”
Jordan looked up and said, “No, it’s fine. Merci. C’est bien.” She shrugged and moved on. She had a brief exchange with Gitanes as she refilled his carafe that Jordan made no attempt to decipher. “Shit,” he said, scratching out another sequence of letters. Gitanes looked over with arched eyebrows. Jordan waved his hand apologetically, saying, “Sorry, sorry, just trying to figure something out. Don’t get your panties in a twist.”
Gitanes abruptly pushed his chair back and stood up. Oh Christ, Jordan thought. The last thing he needed was to get in a fight with some misanthropic old legionnaire. He put his hands up and was strip-mining his semester and a half of high school French for something like an apology when Gitanes pulled out the chair opposite and sat down at his table. Before Jordan could say anything he launched into a guttural monologue. His voice sounded like one of those Tuvan throat singers. Jordan suspected even a native would have trouble understanding him. The cadence of the tale would occasionally rise to a pointed pause, signifying, Jordan assumed, a question, no doubt rhetorical as, after considering his listener for a beat with one eyebrow quivering impossibly high on his forehead, he would plunge right back into the current of the story without waiting for any kind of response.
Jordan smiled to himself. He had misread the old guy. He was just lonely, probably no family, or maybe he had but his wife had died or left him or something. That’s why he was always at the café. He began to nod thoughtfully at the pauses, pursing his lips to show understanding and sympathy even though he had no idea what was being said. It didn’t matter, did it? Sometimes people just needed to talk things through. Most shrinks probably just sat there daydreaming while their patients blathered on, helped them just the same.
There was another pause. The man looked at him expectantly. Jordan said quietly, “My wife thinks I’m dead.”
Gitanes nodded blankly and carried on. At the next break, Jordan said, “My kids, too. I have two, Sophie and Haden. They all think I’m dead. It’s crazy—they had a funeral, buried somebody.”
Now it was a conversation. Jordan was sure neither understood a word the other was saying, but it still felt liberating, just to be able to talk. Gitanes waved his arm and a fresh carafe of wine appeared.
At one point, the old man’s voice rose in outrage and he shook his finger in the air as his eyes brimmed with moisture. The waitress came over and clucked disapprovingly as she cleared the empty carafe and glasses into a bus pan. He lapsed into a sullen silence.
“It all started when we lost the baby. Elizabeth,” Jordan said. “It was my fault. I didn’t know what to say to her to make it better so I hid. I stayed at the lab and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. And the more I felt guilty for letting Stephanie down, for letting her suffer alone in that house with the other kids, the more I stayed away. I thought I could fix things if the business did well. But of course nothing worked—the company was failing, my family was drifting away. I was so deep in debt and no one knew. I felt completely alone.
“I was going to kill myself. I remember the day I hit on it. It was the proverbial aha moment. Of course. That’s the way out, the only way. I know what you’re thinking.” Gitanes was fumbling for a cigarette, lost in his own thoughts.
“But you’re wrong,” Jordan carried on. “I didn’t chicken out. I would have done it. I’m certain.” Jordan gazed over Gitanes’s shoulder at the waning activity in the restaurant, his mind going back over those dark days. His jaw tightened and he nodded to himself. He would have.
“But there were problems. If I had done it, the insurance wouldn’t have paid out and everyone would have been even worse off. So I called the number. My therapist had given it to me, you know, for emergencies. If things ever got so bad I couldn’t go on. And they were and I couldn’t. So I called. I had no idea what would happen but I knew I couldn’t continue as things were. And then men came and took me away.
“They took me to this place and they made it look like I had had a mistress and we’d been killed in an accident. They made up this whole crazy story. Stephanie must have hated me. They all must have. I’m such a coward.” His shoulders started to shake. The old man pushed the nearly empty crumpled cigarette pack across the table. Jordan took one and lit it. He hadn’t smoked since high school and then it had been Marlboro Ultra Lights. The unfiltered cigarette tasted sour and thick and made him dizzy and a little nauseous. The paper stuck to his lips and little bits of tobacco on his tongue made him feel like he was going to gag. He stubbed it out, eyes watering, and laughed. “Pathetic, right?” The Frenchman shook his head heavily from side to side as if bringing the judgment of the ages to bear.
43
AUGURING
Julie was quick. Herron opened the attachment. He scanned down the list quickly, his eye immediately drawn to his own number at 3:19 a.m. At 3:17 there was a text to another number and then a call to the same number at 3:22. There was an incoming call from the same number at 5:21 a.m. He quickly scanned up the page. All the calls but two that day were to the same number and none was longer than a minute. Herron picked up his desk phone and dialed. After four rings a voice answered. “Hey, this is Alex. Leave me a message. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” He remembered the voice, the dead guy’s partner, Penn, no, Prenn. Slick, used to bossing people around. Didn’t like him much, either.
He emailed Julie back. Hey, Julie, you’re the best. Now I’m going to have to owe you one. I need to go further back, say, eight months, and can you pull this one for me, too? and he carefully typed in Alex’s number.
* * *
They were going through dense clouds. You couldn’t tell which way was up but occasionally the wing would cleave a discrete wisp and you could see suddenly how fast they were going. It should have been bumpy but it wasn’t. Horizontal streaks of rain striped the window. Someone had scratched the initials TS into the Plexiglas. The seats were old, unchanged since the ’70s, and stank of decades-old cigarette smoke. He still remembered when you could smoke on planes.
Suddenly the plane broke through the clouds but something was wrong. They were too low. The jungle canopy was right there. They were at the treetops. He knew they were going in. The image out the window, the section of wing, the dense green canopy laced with vines, froze in his eye, like when the old 16 mm films would jam in the projector at school, the image slightly skewed and undersaturated, fading from focus. He felt no fear, just a curious sense of regret. He felt himself pulling back; sounds became muffled and subdued. He was aware of a violent shaking and, even as the snapshot of the window persisted in his mind, he saw the foliage hurtle by as the plane tore through the canopy. So, this would be dying, he thought impassively as his vision tunneled in, vaguely aware that the plane was cartwheeling now. He was glad there would be no pain.
It was quiet. Then there was a harsh Klaxon from the street and Jordan opened his eyes. It was dark. He pressed the stem of his watch—2:45 in the morning. He was wide-awake, eyes fully dilated; the bottom sheet was soaked in sweat but he felt cold. He pulled up the duvet that had slipped to the floor. The skin on his hand felt tight where the sutures had been. It hurt. Tomorrow would be a busy day; he needed to sleep. He’d never believed that stuff about dying in dreams.
He closed his eyes and tried to recapture the thread. The snapshot of the canopy through the window hung there like a dark pool in the forest. He slipped in.
* * *
&nbs
p; The snow was melting on the yews hanging over the walk. The sun couldn’t reach through the overhanging branches, though, so the pattering drops refroze in the shade. As a result the path was lethally slick. Alex was trying to piece together what he was going to say when he lost his footing. He tried to catch himself and hit the ground hard with his elbow, sending shooting pain up and down his arm just before the back of his head struck the icy brick with a solid thud. He lay still, watching the sun glitter off the ice that sheathed the tiny needles like myelin. A drop of water splashed his forehead and he groaned and tried to sit up. The front door opened and Stephanie looked out. Haden was wrapped around her leg and peering out from behind her.
“Jesus, Alex, are you okay?” she said, picking her way carefully down the walk and helping him up. “I meant to salt it but I got distracted.”
He gingerly rubbed the back of his head. “I’ll live, probably get a good bump, though.”
“Come on,” she said, taking his arm, “we’ll ice it.”
He winced and pulled his arm away. “I slammed my funny bone, too.”
“Why’s it called a funny bone?” Haden said. “’Cause it feels funny when you hit it?”
“That’s one reason,” his mother said. “See if you can think of another.”
“I don’t know.”
They made it up the stairs and Alex draped his wet coat over the radiator.
“What is the real name for that bone?” Stephanie said.
Haden thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said, losing interest in the subject.
Sophie was sitting at the piano in the front room listening and chimed in smugly, “It’s called the humerus. Get it?”
Haden rolled his eyes. “Ha, ha.”
* * *
Dennis drove quickly through the cold early-morning streets. They crossed the river and headed east into the tenth arrondissement. He swung the little Citroën into a lone parking spot across the street from a bus stop: Grange aux Belles–Juliette Dodu. A pair of older women with empty mesh bags sat in the shelter, conversing rapidly. Right behind them was a modern brown building that appeared to be wrapped in netting. The face of the building was striped with alternating bands of wide and narrow reflecting windows. On the sides they were flush but in the middle they were set back as if a giant hand had peeled off the ugly shell to reveal the glittering jewel beneath. A small unobtrusive sign by the door identified the building as the Institut de Génétique Moléculaire.
They entered through plain glass doors and Dennis walked purposefully to the security desk. The guard looked up, and before he could speak Dennis handed him a folded piece of paper. The guard opened it and read, glancing once or twice at Jordan as he worked down the page.
Apparently satisfied, he took a white plastic card from a drawer and inserted it into a small machine on the desk. He typed a sequence of numbers into his computer and the card was smoothly ejected. He handed it to Dennis and said, “Deux cent quinze, monsieur,” and went back to his paper.
In the elevator Jordan saw that most of the floors were devoted to the CEPH. He smiled to himself; the Centre d’étude du Polymorphisme Humain had been one of the biggest private labs involved in sequencing of the human genome. They would be well equipped.
Dennis unlocked the door with the card key. The lab was small but more than adequate. “How long you going to need?” Dennis asked, slouching in the doorway.
Jordan took a deep breath. “A while. I’ll probably use deoxyribonuclease I in a solution with manganese ions to cut the strands. That should give a pretty random length assortment. Then I’ll have to treat the fragments with mung bean nuclease to clean up the ends. Otherwise, they could theoretically be able to tell they were restriction cuts, not natural necrosis—”
Dennis interrupted, “How long?”
“Twenty-four hours, maybe?” Jordan said. “I’m not sure because I’ll have to do a gel electrophoresis pass and make sure the strand length distribution corresponds to the hypothetical necrosis. I’ll probably do a couple of shorter incubations with the DNase to make sure I don’t oversegment... I guess I could PCR up some of the longer strands—”
“Okay,” Dennis cut in. “I’ll be back with lunch. Get busy because we only have the lab for today.” The door smoothly clicked shut behind him.
44
CLOSER
Herron held the two lists side by side. There it was—5:21 a.m., Alex calls Stephanie back. Goes to voice mail, nothing on hers until 8:41. But then Prenn calls another number, a 202 area code. DC. His finger ran quickly up the page, then he flipped to the previous one. There. He circled the number and continued back to the beginning of the record.
He scanned Stephanie’s printout. Nothing. Then he went through it again, circling all the calls to or from Prenn. He drew a timeline on the back of an envelope. August 13, Prenn calls DC, and then again early morning on the twenty-fourth, the day after Parrish disappears. Later that day several calls back and forth between Stephanie and Prenn. Through the rest of the fall and winter there’s a pretty constant regular flow of calls between the two of them, all hours, sometimes pretty late, Herron noted. Then on February 26 there’s a call from Prenn to the DC number. That was Thursday, five days ago. Sunday night things got exciting—the calls and texts, the call from Stephanie to him, Prenn calls DC again and here we are.
Herron sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers, thumbs to his chest and pursed lips resting on the index fingers. Connect the dots. Let’s say the wife finds out her husband’s fucking the bimbo he’s set up in the Back Bay apartment. She’s pissed, but she wouldn’t just confront him. She definitely struck Herron as being from the dish-best-served-cold school of vengeful bitches. So she bides her time, cozies up to the partner-slash-best-friend. One thing leads to another; nature takes its inevitable course. Maybe Prenn falls hard for her, and she winds him up tight, sells him the “we have to get rid of my husband, then we can be together” bullshit. Right out of some cheesy noir movie.
Now, Prenn, he knows people, he’s mister finance; he has to have some interesting acquaintances. He calls his DC connection, maybe the guy comes to town. Prenn calls him a few days later and within hours Parrish’s gone. He and his girlfriend wind up in the river dead. And now Prenn and the missus are inseparable, calls, texts all hours. Too easy. That was the thing, though, most people who committed murder got caught. Either because they were stupid or because they figured everybody else was. It was like those kids who shot that liquor store clerk in Revere on New Year’s. They were fucking waving the gun and dancing around laughing, then they shot out the CCTV camera and never thought to take the tape out of the VCR. Herron remembered the stunned expression one kid had on the stand when the video was shown, like he couldn’t believe it. Fucking douchebag.
This one looked like a slam dunk. He was tempted to dial the DC number, but why spook the guy. He picked up the phone and called Julie. This had to be by the book.
“Hey, Jules, it’s me. Listen, there’s a 202 on the sheet you just sent over. I’m going to need everything you got on him. I’m going to Trahon now, so I’ll have the warrant tomorrow. I think this is a very bad guy.”
* * *
The lieutenant was on the phone but motioned him to a chair. Trahon was all right, street cop, came up through the ranks. Herron knew he wouldn’t ask too many questions about where the phone logs came from. But some of the judges could be pricks about shit like that. The last couple of years Herron had seen too many cases thrown out because cops had used cell records off the internet. It was stupid, everybody bought them. Why is it no big deal when telemarketers buy people’s information, but then when the police do it to catch some piece of shit who everyone knows is guilty as sin, all the civil liberties pussies start foaming at the mouth? Maybe he should go visit the widow first, see what he could stir up. He got to his feet and mouthed, “It can wait,” as he
headed out. Trahon shrugged and went back to his call.
* * *
Dennis had dropped off a salami sandwich and a bottle of Vittel around noon. He had brought a dinner menu from the brasserie at the corner and Jordan circled the rabbit stew, which Dennis had delivered at six. Other than that he had left him alone. He came back around eleven. “How are we doing?” he asked.
“Okay, I think,” Jordan said. He looked tired. “I’m on the third round of DNase. I just want to be sure it doesn’t end up looking like I’ve been dead six years instead of six months so I’m going in short increments. It’s a little unpredictable. I’ve never tried to control the fragment size this closely before. It’s tricky...” His voice trailed off. “It needs to be right.”
“Yes, it does,” Dennis said. Then after a moment, “I can give you until six in the morning but that’s it. Got it?” Jordan nodded.
“Have a good night, Doc,” Dennis said and clapped him on the shoulder.
* * *
As soon as he was alone, Jordan crossed to the BioAutomation MerMade 384, a massive rolling steel apparatus surmounted by a hydra’s head of plastic tubing and bottles, and turned the monitor back on. He didn’t know if Dennis would have known what the DNA synthesizer was, never mind that it wasn’t necessary for what he was supposed to be doing, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He unfolded the creased paper place mat from his pocket and, finding his place, quickly continued entering As, Cs, Gs and Ts on the computer keyboard. The MerMade wasn’t what he was used to, but the Oligo software was intuitive enough and the machine was actually faster than the synthesizer in Jordan’s lab. He checked the progress bar; he was going to make it. Just.
* * *
Alex held the Ziploc bag of ice cubes against the lump on the back of his head. It throbbed dully. He looked concerned. “If he calls again, I think you have to answer. Otherwise, it looks like you’re hiding something.”
Exit Strategy Page 16