The Genesis Code

by John Case

  The doctor jerked his mask down. He had bright little eyes and an overbite that reminded Lassiter of a chipmunk. ‘Didn’t I make myself clear? I told you people! This is a sterile environment.’ Lassiter didn’t say anything, and he didn’t back away. He just looked at him, and the look was so devoid of interest that the chipmunk faltered a little before he went on. ‘No one is authorized to enter this ward.’

  The chipmunk obviously thought he was with the police, and Lassiter saw no reason to set him straight. ‘Mr. Doe is a suspect in a double homicide,’ he said. ‘I’d like to talk to him as soon as possible.’

  ‘At the moment,’ the chipmunk said in a patronizing voice, ‘my patient is heavily sedated and extremely vulnerable to infection. I will let you know when it’s appropriate to interview him.’

  Lassiter nodded. ‘Thanks for your help.’

  ‘And he won’t be doing any talking for a while, in any case.’

  ‘Really? And why’s that?’

  The chipmunk smiled and poked a finger at his own throat. ‘I told you guys. Trach tube.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It means that he can’t talk.’

  Lassiter looked at Doe through the glass, and then back at the doctor. ‘For how long?’

  The chipmunk shrugged. ‘Look, Detective,’ he said in an exasperated tone, ‘all you really have to do is wait, right? He’ll have a little scarring, maybe a lot – the left side of his face, the neck, the chest – but he’s going to make it. And in the meantime – he’s not going anywhere. We’ll keep you informed about his status.’

  ‘You do that,’ Lassiter said. He walked away.

  That evening, Lassiter stretched out on the couch and flicked on the TV. He must have made forty calls. Half the people he called already knew about it and they pressed him for details. After a while the sheer number of times he recited the facts had the effect of detaching him from what he was saying. His voice rattled on with the neutral composure of a newscaster’s, as if he were reporting on crop failures in Idaho.

  The other half of the calls were much worse – when they didn’t know. They were ambushed by the news, a bombshell in an ordinary day. And however they reacted, he felt battered by their raw emotion.

  He bounced from channel to channel but it was impossible to actually watch anything. He was too restless; he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d forgotten to do something important. He got a beer and went up the spiral staircase and out onto the deck on the third floor. The house was perched on the side of a hill, and up here he was in the treetops. He leaned against the railing and looked through the black branches at the pale, occluded sky. There were no stars.

  He could hear the phone ringing. At first he decided not to answer it, and then he changed his mind.

  ‘Hello.’

  Riordan’s voice leaped through the telephone. ‘“Hello?” Is that what you say? Hello? Well, fuck you!’

  Lassiter looked at the telephone. ‘What?’

  ‘What what? What the fuck were you doing on the burn ward?’

  ‘Is that what this is all about?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what this is all about: John Doe pulled the fucking tube out of his throat.’

  ‘He did what?’

  ‘He tried to kill himself. The doctors tell me he’s so doped up he can’t count to fucking one, and yet he pulls out his trach tube. His hand is still curled around the thing when they find him. They have to pry his fingers off.’

  Lassiter felt a sudden rush of fear, a plume of sensation in his chest. He didn’t want John Doe to die. He had a lot of questions, and Doe was the guy with all the answers. Also, John Doe was the one who was going to pay, the focus of his vengeance. ‘Is he all right? Is he going –’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, he’ll pull through all right and he didn’t short circuit his brain neither. But what I want to get back to is you! What the fuck was on your mind? I got this new partner, you know? Junior G-man type. He’s always got an idea, and this time he’s thinking out loud, maybe John Doe didn’t try to off himself. Under the circumstances, the guy being so doped up and all – maybe he had some help.’

  ‘What? Was anybody –’

  Riordan interrupted. ‘And then Dr. Whozee says something about the “other detective” who stopped by the burn ward. And Junior G-man says, “What other detective?” And it doesn’t sound like any of our guys. In fact, it sounds just like you.’

  Lassiter admitted it. ‘I wanted to look at him.’

  Riordan barked a nasty laugh. ‘Right. You’re window shopping. Well, that wasn’t very smart.’

  ‘I didn’t even get in the door. The doctor kicked me out.’

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘Well, you heard right. When did this happen, anyway? The thing with the tube?’

  Riordan ignored him. ‘You tell me. Where’d you go?’

  ‘Wait a minute. You think I was in there? You think I put the guy’s hands around the tube? You’re asking me for an alibi?’ He nearly hung up. He was innocent of what Riordan was tossing around, and he felt the bruised outrage of the falsely accused. ‘I came home,’ he said. ‘And I’ve been on the telephone ever since I got here.’

  ‘Well, we can check on that,’ Riordan said.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Thanks to you, I have to,’ Riordan said. ‘Look, let me tell you something. I don’t think you went in there, okay? I think this guy tried to off himself. That’s what went down. The doctors are checking him every ten minutes, there’s another little kid on the ward, there’s a nurse’s station tucked back in there, there’s people all over the place, there’s no way. But you – you’re a fucking loose cannon. You go down there, you pretend you’re a detective –’

  ‘I never said I was a detective. The doctor just –’

  Riordan ignored him. ‘First of all, I get my ass called on the carpet for not posting a guard on Doe – which I already put in the request for, you know, but the uniform just takes his time getting to the hospital. And now I got to waste my time, checking your fucking phone records. And if I don’t check, it looks funny because everybody knows I know you. And another thing – I don’t think you were just window shopping, either. I bet you had some half-assed idea you were going to talk to the guy.’

  Lassiter took a deep breath and exhaled.

  ‘And that would’ve been just terrific,’ Riordan said. ‘Suppose you get your wish and you have a heart-to-heart with the guy and he spills his guts. What about when this guy comes to trial? You know what a defense attorney would do with that?’

  ‘Why would he try to kill himself?’

  Riordan sighed. ‘Maybe he was overcome with remorse,’ he said in a played-out voice.

  ‘I wonder –’

  ‘Do me a favor,’ Riordan interrupted. ‘Don’t wonder. Don’t do anything. Help me solve the case: stay the fuck out of it.’

  Riordan’s anger was jump-starting a headache behind Lassiter’s eyes. ‘I’ll stay out of it,’ he said, ‘as soon as you tell me who killed my sister –’

  ‘John Fucking Doe killed your sister.’

  ‘And who he is. And why.’

  9

  IT WAS WARM for November, nearly eighty degrees on the day of the funeral. The falling leaves, bright as jewels, spun in the air on a sultry, almost tropical breeze. It was the beginning of winter, but the weather was as balmy as June. This made the brilliant foliage seem out of place, even artificial. Those who came to the funeral from out of town had expected cooler weather, and now they were sweaty and uncomfortable in their cashmeres and tweeds, corduroys and woolens. Even Lassiter was feeling a little woozy. The improbable warmth, the uncomfortable mourners, the twisting leaves – it was as if they were on location, filming a movie, and the movie was being shot out of sequence, and in the wrong season.

  He couldn’t shake this feeling of unreality. Even the caskets were like stage props, the smaller one pointedly tiny, as if to dramatize the cruelty of what had happened. The minister �
�� from the Unitarian church Kathy had started to attend in the last year – might as well have been cast to play the role. He had precisely the right earnest demeanor, the ability to lock eyes and clasp hands with meaningful emotion.

  But it wasn’t real emotion, or if it was, it wasn’t specific to Kathy: the minister had compassion for everyone – he was steeped in the stuff – which made his grief easy and generic. Not that Lassiter minded, particularly: the church was a large one, and the minister didn’t really know his sister. On the telephone, when they arranged the memorial service and the funeral, the clergyman had asked for help in ‘personalizing the ceremony.’ He wanted to know how ‘the deceased was referred to.’ Was it Kathleen? Or was it Kate, or Kath, or Kathy? He wanted an anecdote or two, something to remind her family and friends of the ‘living woman.’

  Now, at the graveside, the minister was saying something dull and predictably uplifting. It was about the boundless terrain Kathy and Brandon inhabited now, about the infinite range of the spirit. At least it sounded dull to Lassiter, the words slotting into the expected space in the ceremony. But his aunt Lillian – the only other relative in attendance – must have been getting something out of it because she leaned toward him and gave his hand a fervent squeeze.

  In some ways, he realized, this strangely artificial feeling had been with him ever since he learned of Kathy’s death. At first he thought it was a normal reaction to sudden death, a kind of shock. But standing there in the cemetery, he could see that his sense of unreality was so pervasive because, like most people, he’d attended far more cinematic funerals than real ones. And he was waiting for the telltale close-up. Or the slow pan to the grassy knoll, where a mysterious onlooker stood, silhouetted against the sun. A lover paying respects from a safe distance. Or a killer, relishing the calamity that he’d wrought.

  Lassiter was waiting for something, music or a camera angle, to put the event in perspective.

  But it never happened. That, in the end, was what made it all so unreal. Something was missing – a reason for the deaths that were being mourned. Kathy and Brandon were hardly the victims of random violence – the murders were obviously premeditated – and yet . . . nothing. The police didn’t even have a theory. And the man with the answers had taken a turn for the worse. He was unconscious, in critical condition, his damaged lungs infected, his skin suppurating. It might be weeks, Lassiter had been told, before he could be questioned.

  The people at the graveside had a subdued and weary look. They’d been flattened by the sudden and brutal death of someone they cared about. For Brandon, there was shocked sadness from the parents of half-a-dozen preschool friends. His teacher, a woman with long brown hair pinned back from her face, wiped her eyes. Her lower lip trembled. Nearby, a little boy stood hand in hand with his mother, a woman in sunglasses and a veiled hat.

  To mourn Kathy, there were a few coworkers from National Public Radio, where she worked as a producer. A couple of neighbors. A roommate from Sweet Briar who’d driven four hundred miles in deference to twenty years of Christmas and birthday cards. And Murray – the indefatigable, great-hearted Murray – Kathy’s ex-husband. But no close friends, really, because Kathy had no close friends.

  For the family, there was only himself and Aunt Lillian. The small family showing, however, was not due to Kathy’s somewhat reclusive and difficult character. He realized with a start that he and Lillian – his father’s seventy-six-year-old sister – were all that remained of two family trees dwindling into deadwood.

  Murray was the only one who actually wept. And like the minister, his grief was not really specific to the woman in the casket. Murray was the kind of guy who might get choked up over replacing a favorite couch. Even so, Lassiter was grateful. The uninhibited display of sorrow seemed a tribute to his sister, better than the largest bouquet.

  The minister finally stopped talking, finishing with a verbal flourish about beacons in the wilderness. Lassiter threw a handful of dirt on each coffin, and a white rose for Kathy. And then he turned away.

  Others followed his example, and he stood ten yards away, up the path, and each of the mourners came up to squeeze his hand or kiss his cheek, and say how sorry they were.

  One of the first was the woman with the little boy, who introduced herself as Marie Sanders. ‘And this is Jesse,’ she said proudly. Lassiter smiled at the boy and wondered if he was her son; they didn’t look anything alike. He had a dark complexion, with bottomless brown eyes and jet-black hair that crowded his forehead with curls. He was beautiful, and so was she, but not in the same way. She was pale, blond, and . . . somehow familiar.

  ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.

  She didn’t seem surprised by the question, but shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  ‘It’s just that . . . I thought we might have met.’

  She smiled nervously. ‘I just wanted to say how sorry I am. Kathy –’ She looked down and shook her head. ‘I saw it on the news.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I tried to call her friends –’

  ‘Oh no – please. I didn’t know her that well. It was so unlikely, you know, that I would even learn of her death.’

  ‘But you said –’

  ‘I don’t live here,’ she said hurriedly. ‘We were traveling. It was a satellite television and one of the network feeds was from Washington.’ She stopped talking and bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry. I’m babbling.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I met your sister . . . in Europe, and I liked her so much. We had a lot in common. So when I saw her picture and Brandon’s on the television . . .’ Her voice got shaky, and through the veil he could see that her eyes had filled with tears. ‘Anyway, something compelled me to come.’ She took a shaky breath and then recovered her composure. ‘And I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lassiter said. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  And then she was gone, and Murray was standing in front of him with tears rolling down his cheeks. ‘It’s so hard,’ he said, putting his arms around Lassiter. ‘I’m telling you, Joe, it’s so fucking hard.’

  Lassiter himself did not remember how to cry, but his throat ached with the sadness that he felt. He was losing someone who knew him in a way that no one else ever would, someone who shared his childhood. He was losing the ‘Alliance,’ the solemn word Kathy had invented for their partnership as children, a kind of mutual protection society against their parents.

  Her earnest little face came back to him. In their playroom in Washington, inside a kind of tent that Kathy had built with blankets and bedsheets. He might have been five, Kathy ten. ‘We have to stick together,’ she said, ‘you and me. I’ve decided we have to form an alliance.’ It was years before the word was really part of his vocabulary, but he knew what she meant. Kathy had a list of written vows spelling out their responsibilities, which she read to him. Number 1: Never tell on a member of the Alliance. They pricked their fingers and dripped blood on the paper and then buried it under the spruce tree. Even as adults they kept the habit of signing letters and cards to each other with Kathy’s invented symbol, the sideways A.

  Their father, Elias, had been a congressman for more than twenty years. Whenever his name appeared in the papers, which was often, it was followed by a short parenthesis: (R-Ky.). The money that propelled Eli into office belonged to his wife, Josie. Her grandfather had made a fortune in whiskey, and enough of it had trickled down through the generations to make Josie, an only child, quite a catch for the ambitious young man from the wrong part of Louisville.

  Neither Eli nor Josie took more than a supervisory interest in their children. Like most people in Congress, they bounced back and forth between Washington and their home state, with the result that Kathy and Joe were raised not so much by Mom and Dad, but by a string of nannies, au pairs, baby-sitters, and later, ‘assistants.’

  Joe himself had never given much thought to the gulf that existed between himself and his par
ents. He was afraid of his father’s cruel temper and saw little of his mother. That was just the way it was. He’d attended an expensive private school in Washington, and many of his friends were in much the same boat. But it had bothered Kathy, or it did until she reached the point where she just didn’t care anymore.

  He knew that because once, when he’d been summoned from the kitchen with a drink for Josie, he walked in on a confrontation between his sister and his mother. Kathy had a fierce look on her face and was saying, ‘You don’t really care about us at all. You just wanted children so you’d have some to put on your Christmas card.’

  Josie, seated at her vanity, took a sip of her drink. She angled her head and attached an earring. ‘Why, sweetheart,’ she said, never actually taking her eyes off her reflection, ‘that’s not true. You’re very special to me.’ He could still hear his mother’s sugary voice. Ver-rah speh-shul. Having reassured her daughter, Josie stood, lifted a crystal atomizer, sprayed the air, and then walked through the cloud of scent. ‘Now give Mummy a kiss,’ she said. ‘I’m runnin’ late.’

  Eli handled his parental responsibilities as obligations. He actually penciled his children into his busy days, a fact revealed to Joe by his sister. One night at their house in Washington, she took him into Eli’s study and showed him the leather-bound appointment book, where they could find their own place in the congressman’s busy schedule.

  7:00 – Prayer Breakfast with Young Republicans

  8:30 – RNC Headquarters: Republican Steering Committee

  10:15 – Children to Zoo

  Virtually every contact between Eli and his children, at least during the time they were in D.C., was planned in advance.

  Take Joe to Camillo’s: haircut.

  Speak to Kathy re Dreams versus Plans.

  They took to scanning the appointment book to see what was in store for them, and feigned illness or made other plans to avoid those functions at which they were to be dragged along as window dressing. They covered for each other; they lied for each other; they presented a united front.