Living Proof

by Kira Peikoff

  FOUR

  Right away, Dopp spotted two problems with the inspector’s report on his desk: the actual embryo count did not match the records, and there was no signature from the head doctor as required. It was from an inspection conducted that very morning at a clinic on the Upper East Side. At the bottom of the page was a scrawled note:

  ATTN BOSS: 9 missing, but Dr. locked himself in office and refused to sign. Case for you.

  Must be an old-timer, Dopp thought, shaking his head. Few remained—doctors who stubbornly thought their seniority would allow them laxer oversight, or who were still clinging to the days of zero regulation. Dopp shuddered, unwilling to imagine how regularly embryos had been destroyed in those days, and for the sake of what? The justifications chilled him: Savage experimentation? Shelf space? It was unfathomable, a clear violation of the sacred right to life.

  And how many had been lost? No one would ever know, since it was before the government kept such records, but the question haunted him. Hundreds of thousands, he guessed, if not more.

  He glanced up to look at the thing that calmed him: A digital picture frame propped next to his computer spun through dozens of family pictures, a slideshow he often updated. He picked up the frame, pausing it on a photo of his two-year-old daughter, Abby, splashing in an inflated Jacuzzi in their Long Island backyard. She was too young to know it now, but one day she would understand how much his work related to her own existence.

  After nine failed attempts at in vitro fertilization and more than $100,000, his wife, Joanie, had become pregnant naturally with Abby. Despite the Catholic Church’s disapproval of in vitro, when four years of trying had worn out their patience, Dopp had reluctantly given in to Joanie’s desperation to try the procedure, and God had made them pay the price. But everything happened for a reason, and Dopp knew that God wanted them to endure those years, which could hardly be summed up by the word struggle; no, it was closer to an all-encompassing feeling of failure that strained his marriage and his confidence, an ordeal that thrust him into a pattern of empty reassurances, holding Joanie and stroking her belly as she wept, while he whispered in her ear, “It’s not your fault, sweetie, it will happen.…” Crusted underneath his words like hidden grime was a private guilt—he was fifteen years older than she, and surely not as potent as a younger man.

  God’s reason for their agony, as he interpreted it after Abby’s birth, was to show him the true nature of fertility doctors: They were swift in cashing their payment after each time Joanie did not get pregnant, and swifter still in urging her to try the same, costly, difficult procedure again. But what he resented the most were the pictures of the doctors’ own babies in their offices: eight-by-eleven-inch portraits of tender faces that mocked him and Joanie with their own inability to conceive. He had been angered by the doctors’ insensitivity and their lack of compassion in displaying the photos. It was only after he and Joanie stopped trying with the doctors that God had blessed them with Abby, just as He had blessed them seven years prior with Ethan. And, as if to reward their patience, God had smiled upon them once more: elated and incredulous, Joanie was now, at age forty-one, pregnant again.

  Yet Dopp understood that there was a darker reason for their struggles to conceive, and he knew that Joanie knew it, too. Their suffering was God’s punishment for Dopp’s abandonment of the priesthood. Fifteen years ago, right after the DEP had first formed, Dopp was a revered priest at a large Catholic Church on Long Island. As a younger, idealistic man, he had hardly flinched at the vow of celibacy, believing that pleasures of the flesh were only a sinful distraction from God’s work. Though the work was spiritually fulfilling, he became crushingly lonely. It was a feeling he alternately discounted and wrestled with, never reaching a solution.

  At about the same time that he began to sink into a depression, he noticed a beautiful young woman sitting in the front pew of his congregation; her green eyes watched him intensely—erotically, he thought—as if he were the only person there. She was slender like a dancer, and just as graceful, with limbs that seemed to exert no effort when she came up to take her Communion. Those moments were the closest Dopp came to her, the moments he began to look forward to. If only for a few seconds, he could smell her perfume and admire the way her dress straps fell against her white collarbone. She always sat alone at the service. The first time she caught him watching her, she had smiled a strange mocking smile, as if extending a forbidden invitation. Looking back, Dopp would realize that their relationship had begun then, and that the months they exchanged glances over the heads of the congregation had been not a prelude to courtship, but the main act, a deliciously public trespassing. To Dopp, Sundays had become like dates, each seemingly more intimate than the last. It was both an ecstasy and a torment to feel such temptation. They had not exchanged a word, but what they shared was enough to sate his desire, more pleasure than he had ever expected from a woman. At least he told himself it was enough.

  And then one Sunday, she didn’t show up. Or the next, or the next. Dopp lost focus. Each week, he watched the back door of the church as he delivered a halfhearted sermon. Later he would find out that she had forced herself to stay away, that she knew she risked ruining him. She fought for him valiantly by remaining scarce, not knowing that he was ruined either way. After three weeks, Dopp insisted to himself that her absence was for the best, that his loneliness had probably blown the whole thing out of proportion. That maybe it was God’s way of letting him off gracefully.

  But after six weeks, she returned.

  He stopped her after the service for the first time, as the other churchgoers were leaving. She didn’t seem surprised.

  “Where were you?” he asked before any introduction.

  “I didn’t know you took attendance,” she replied. She smiled up at him with a look of pain: I’ve given up, so here I am.

  “It would help if I knew your name,” he said.

  “Joanie,” she replied, extending her hand. “I think I already know yours.”

  As soon as he clutched her hand, Dopp knew he had surrendered the priesthood. It was the quiet death of a life he could no longer uphold. Their affair quickly grew physical—a step neither of them even pretended to fight—and Dopp officially left his post within a month. A brief uproar ensued, as the scandal seemed to envelop their neighborhood, but Dopp knew. His instinct had never failed him; as counterintuitive as it seemed, this was what he had needed all along. The gossip eventually subsided as the new priest urged forgiveness, but Dopp and Joanie moved to another town anyway. They married a year later.

  Dopp became resigned to the fact that he would always be a sinner in God’s eyes. It was a trade-off he had struck the moment he first touched her. As selfish as it was, he would rather die now than live without his wife, and so there was only one thing for him to do: spend his life making it up to God. Working at the DEP seemed a good place to start, and over the years, he had risen steadily to chief. But whenever some fate turned against him, as with their struggles to have a baby, Dopp knew why. He was not angry; he only wished that Joanie did not have to suffer for his heresy. Yet God, working in His mysterious way, must have known that any pain Joanie endured was a thousand times worse for Dopp than his own.

  After Abby’s birth, Dopp had thrown himself into his work, hoping it would prove his true devotion to God, and thus spare his family any further hardship. Seeing himself not only as an embryo advocate, but also a patient advocate, he pushed for a new department initiative to leverage doctors’ monetary motivations against them. It was his idea to set doctors’ pay contingent upon their patients’ appraisal of their compassion during treatment. Although patients could technically lie and underpay, Dopp assumed that people who were satisfied with their treatment would want to pay for their doctor’s services; however, this initiative would be impossible to implement and monitor without greatly increasing the DEP’s budget. Keeping it steady for next year was already his foremost worry, as the liberals in the state assembly
were anticipating the upcoming budget negotiations with glee, knowing that for the first time in a decade, they were equal in number to their foes: just plentiful enough to pose a threat to the conservative agenda.

  Dopp took a deep breath, kissed the picture of his daughter’s smiling face, and set the frame down on his desk. Then he picked up the inspector’s report with the missing signature and studied it again. He would have to face the rogue old-timer directly, and the sooner, the better.

  He pressed a button on his desk phone that connected him straight to his driver.

  “Hello?” came a familiar voice.

  “Hey, Mark,” Dopp said. “Got some time?” It was their running joke; Mark’s full-time job was to stay on call for him.

  “I think I can squeeze you in.”

  “See you in five.”

  * * *

  Trent sat riveted to his computer screen. He was staring at the profile of Arianna Drake on NYfaces.com, a ubiquitous social networking website. Dopp had instructed him to search for a way to base their initial meeting on what would seem to be a common interest, to make it appear unplanned. So Trent had turned to scrutinizing her profile for details he could use.

  He had seen the page before, when he was compiling background information on her for last week’s presentation, but this time her picture was new. She was sitting on a swing that was dashing forward like a whooshing pendulum. Her head was thrown back and her black hair reached her waist, flying in all directions. The picture captured her mid-laughter, eyes squeezed shut. Beneath a yellow sundress, her tan bare legs stretched up to the sky.

  Her joy was like a fistful of mud flung into his face, but he could not wrench his gaze away from the screen. He stared at her curves, coyly outlined under her dress. She had no right to be beautiful, he thought irritably. And he had no right to think it.

  He became further frustrated by the relative lack of personal details she provided on her page. This assignment required him to be secretive himself, so in preparation, he had erased his own profile page, and Dopp had erased his name from the department’s website. As a government agency, it wasn’t difficult for them to have their contacts at all the major search engines get rid of any leftover web crawl data relating to Trent in his current capacity. There was no longer an online trace of Trent Rowe, agent, only Trent Rowe, ex-reporter. His trail stopped after the last article he had written several years earlier. Dopp had decided it was safer for him to use his real name and cover only his current path, rather than invent a fake persona that would be risky to sustain: This way, they wouldn’t have to worry about her seeing his driver’s license, credit cards, or mail.

  On Arianna’s profile page, the fields of home address and contact information were left predictably blank. She listed herself as single, which made his strategy clearer. At first, he had considered becoming a regular sperm donor, so as to establish a patient–doctor relationship that he could then try to exploit. But that route would be slow, since he could go in only once a week to donate, at which time, he would have little contact with her. Dopp convinced him it would be faster, albeit riskier, to approach her as a potential beau, since apparently she did not already have one. If she fell for him, Dopp reasoned, perhaps she would confide the truth about her clinic. It was a one-shot gamble, though; if she rejected him, they would have to give the case to another undercover agent. Trent had decided not to worry Dopp by telling him about his recent track record with women; he also realized, with relief, that he would not be telling Arianna about his job, the one handicap he most encountered. If only it were so easy in his own life to assume an alter ego with no qualms about truth or lies. Blessedly zero guilt about ethics applied to him now—this was a mission, and his Machiavellian mentality was not only logical; it was necessary. He remembered Dopp’s words, delivered with the conviction of a judge: Secrecy breeds the need for secrecy.

  Trent continued to study the rest of Arianna’s profile. Under employment, she listed her position as founder and head doctor of the Washington Square Center for Reproductive Medicine. Under the section labeled “activities,” the information was mostly too vague to help him: “dancing, painting, cooking, biking.” There was only one specific revelation. For “favorite books,” she wrote: “anything by Aaron Dakota.” Dakota was the rare mystery writer whose books were also critically esteemed, a one-two punch for popular culture.

  Trent leaned forward in his chair, typing into a search engine. Dakota was on a book tour promoting his newest hardcover, The Found Link. In two nights, he would be stopping in New York City. That would give Trent time to buy and read the book, and then approach Arianna at the signing as if he were a fellow fan.

  But how would she know to be there? An idea wormed into his head, and before he had fully contemplated it, he was already creating a fake profile on NYfaces.com of a bubbly, professional-looking woman in her twenties, whose picture he stole randomly from a website of personal assistants. He invented a common name and a few generic hobbies. Under the employment section, he wrote: “publicist for Aaron Dakota.” Then he quickly typed a message:

  Hi there! I noticed you’re a fellow fan of Aaron Dakota and I just wanted to let you know that he will be signing copies of The Found Link this coming Wednesday at the Barnes & Noble at 66th and Broadway at 7 P.M. This special event is not to be missed, so we’re trying to spread the message to all of his New York fans. Hope to see you there and happy reading!

  Without hesitating, he sent the message off into the oblivion of the web, hoping Arianna would check her profile in time. Everyone he knew checked the site at least once a day; their generation had grown up on it. Then he rushed to Dopp’s office and told him the plan, aware that he sounded more confident about her expected presence than he had reason to be: even if she did check her messages, what if she was already busy that night?

  “Good,” Dopp said. He rose and opened the safe next to his desk. He withdrew his pistol, a Glock 23, and secured it in his holster. Wearing the gun, a show of police powers—and the urgency of their work—meant that Dopp was leaving to go into the field. Thank God, Trent thought, his own turn to get out was coming.

  “Right now,” Dopp added, “I want you to accompany me. There’s something I want you to see. Don’t ask questions yet. Just watch and learn.”

  Trent nodded, surprised. He followed Dopp into the Lincoln Town Car waiting outside.

  The driver, a round-faced man, turned and smiled.

  “Hi, boss. What’s doing?”

  “Hey, Mark, how was Kristin’s birthday party yesterday?”

  Mark grinned. “It was a blast. All the kids loved the piñata, but the water slide was the biggest hit. I can’t believe she’s already six.”

  “That’s great, man,” Dopp said. “Yeah, they grow up so quickly. Just enjoy every minute of it. I was joking to my wife yesterday about when we’re going to have the next baby after this one comes.”

  “Number four, eh?” Mark whistled.

  “It’s really not up to us, though,” Dopp replied. “Anyway, we’re off to Sixty-eighth Street. Between Park and Lex.”

  The car lurched forward. As Trent looked out the window at the slideshow of buildings, he felt a surge of goodwill toward his boss. He marveled at Dopp’s ability to establish a rapport with all his employees; no wonder he was such a popular boss. Even the cynic in Trent was impressed: Dopp could be counted on, with the consistency of an atomic clock, to make those who worked for him feel worthy of his respect.

  “Here we are,” the driver said, pulling up in front of a glass door.

  Trent and Dopp slid out of the backseat and walked to the door, which was almost inconspicuous between a pharmacy and a hardware store. Trent saw that white painted letters read FAMILY FERTILITY SERVICES above a smaller name, DR. BRIAN HANSON, OB-GYN. Next to the doorknob, there was a tiny block about the size of a sugar cube. Most people probably never noticed it, Trent thought.

  Dopp turned to him with his lips pressed together. “Want to do
the honors?”

  Trent smiled nervously and reached into his suit jacket for a shiny gold badge splashed with the hologram DEP: the magnetic all-access pass to any fertility clinic in the city. He waved it in front of the cube. A pinpoint green light flashed, and the lock audibly clicked open. Dopp pushed the door, and Trent followed him inside as an alarm began to shriek. What were they doing here, anyway?

  Holding their ears, they walked into the waiting room, where two pregnant women shrank back, gaping at Dopp’s gun, eyes darting around for help. The alarm was quickly silenced, and it left behind a perceptible ringing in Trent’s ears. The women leaned hard against the cheerful yellow couches. Feeling like an intruder, Trent almost blurted out an apology, but before he could speak, a worried-looking nurse rushed toward them from an inner hallway.

  Dopp flashed his DEP badge at her, and she slowed as if to keep her distance.

  “How can I help you?” she asked coldly.

  “I think you know who we want to see,” Dopp murmured. His quiet voice was even more compelling than a barked order, Trent thought.

  “The doctor is in with a patient,” the nurse retorted, though Trent could see her resolve weakening as she glanced between them.

  “Tell him it’s an emergency.”

  She took a step back. “One moment.”

  She turned around and scurried away. Trent looked at Dopp with an eyebrow raised, but Dopp held up a hand. Trent glanced over his shoulder at the women sitting on the couches. Their faces slipped behind pink Parent Talk magazines.

  Dopp turned to them. “Sorry for the interruption, ladies.” He held up his badge. “My partner and I are here to take care of some state business.”

  “Is—is everything okay?” one of them stammered.

  “That’s what we’re here to make sure of,” Dopp said.

  The women shifted anxiously, set the magazines down, and rubbed their stomachs. It reminded Trent of being on a turbulent airplane, when the pretext of normalcy disappears.