by John Case
‘So they have all the eggs they’ll ever have – from the very beginning. And when the women get older, the eggs get older, and sometimes things begin to go wrong. The chromosomes get iffy, you get a lot more genetic disorders, or the eggs don’t get fertilized as easily. So this technique was developed. And a woman like Hannah – she can then bear a child. Someone like Baresi removes an egg from a younger woman – the donor – and they fertilize that egg with . . . well, Hannah’s husband’s sperm . . . and put the fertilized egg in the older woman.’ Exhausted by this, Hugh took a long sip of brandy, rolled it around in his mouth, and swallowed.
‘So . . . biologically speaking . . . it’s not really the woman’s child.’
Hugh flicked his fingernail at the rim of the brandy snifter. It made a little pinging noise. ‘I disagree. In biological terms, it is her child. She carries it to term, she gives birth, she nurses it. But, in the genetic sense, no – they have nothing in common at that level. All the DNA comes from the husband and the donor. I think Hannah was a little bothered by that.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, he didn’t look much like Jiri, did he? The lad, I mean.’
‘I don’t know,’ Lassiter said. ‘I saw a photograph, but the child was a baby. But . . . you stayed in touch?’
‘Oh, absolutely. For a couple of years we wrote every week. Then it fell off. She did send me a picture of the little chap – and . . . well . . . I suppose he resembled the donor . . . because there wasn’t a lot of Jiri in him . . . not that Jiri’s any prize.’
‘What I still don’t understand is why it took a month –’
‘Well, first it was because of the hormone injections. I was telling you. The woman who received the egg,’ Hugh explained. ‘She had to synchronize her . . . you know – her cycle . . . with the donor’s. And then it was old Baresi.’
‘Right.’
‘He insisted on having them here, the whole month, as I said – which was not the way at other clinics. Even the local clients he kept here. He liked to monitor the hormones very closely. Also, he didn’t like them flying – said it was a mistake . . . something about the air pressure.’
Lassiter was frowning. This was . . . a big deal Kathy had been through. Yet she’d never said anything about hormone injections, oocytes, or egg donations. But then, Kathy had always been reserved about that sort of thing. She wouldn’t have talked about anything so intimate. Even with him. And, maybe, especially with him.
‘May I ask you something?’ Hugh said.
‘Of course.’
‘Would you keep in touch? About these murders, I mean. Nigel teases me about Hannah, but I liked her a great deal.’ He made a helpless gesture, looked up at Lassiter and yawned hugely. ‘Well, I’m totally knackered,’ he said. ‘I’d better tuck in.’ He headed off, a bit unsteadily, down the hall.
Lassiter returned to the guest register, running his finger down the pages and pages of names and addresses, his eyes scanning for the telltale letters: C.B. It was a mindless task, and as he performed it, a thought occurred to him.
Was it possible the murders had something to do with the donors – of eggs or sperm? He found a name, typed it into his computer. There were cases of people pursuing their genetic offspring – men uninformed of their paternity, who later learned that a child of theirs had been given up for adoption. He’d seen a piece about it on ‘60 Minutes,’ or something.
It’s late, Lassiter told himself. You’re tired. Grimaldi on a search-and-destroy mission to eliminate his own offspring? It seemed to him he’d discarded that notion once before – and he’d been justified in doing so. There was no reason to believe that Grimaldi was a sperm donor, and even if he was, why would he hunt down his ‘children’? Unless he was crazy – and Lassiter had ditched ‘crazy’ a long time ago.
He found another C.B. and typed it in.
But what if . . . what if there was an estate, an inheritance? And what if, the heir to that estate knew that the deceased had been a sperm donor? The heir might begin to fear that the donor’s offspring would one day seek him out – and lay claim to the estate? Definitely a long reach, Lassiter thought. So much simpler just to destroy the clinic’s records – which had been done in addition to killing the children.
His finger fell upon another entry, a woman who’d stayed for thirty-two days at the pensione. She was the fourth, so far. He hadn’t reached Hannah Reiner’s name yet, but from what Hugh said, she was another. Because Hannah and Kathy had been subjects of an oocyte procedure, he’d taken to marking those names with a double asterisk, in case the longer stay turned out to be significant.
And here was another: Marie Williams, of Minneapolis, Minnesota. She’d checked into the pensione on March 26, 1991, and left on April 28. She and Kathy had had the same procedure, and their stays had overlapped for more than a week. They must have met each other, Lassiter thought.
He continued to turn the pages in the register, writing down the names of the clinic’s guests, until he came to yet another oocyte procedure:
Marion Kerr – C.B.
17 Elder Lane
Bressingham, B.C.
Arr.: 17–11–92
Dep.: 19–12–92
Lassiter had already typed the entry into his computer and was moving on to the next entry when it hit him. Bressingham. British Columbia. Canada. He’d forgotten the Kerr name – it hadn’t seemed important. But now . . . he was stunned. That Nexis search . . . in Prague . . . just before he met Jiri Reiner . . . arson-child-homicide, or something like that . . . and one of the hits – the only real hit – had been a story about a family named Kerr.
He didn’t remember any of the details, except one, and it was this one detail that took his breath away: the Kerrs’ baby had been killed when Grimaldi was in the hospital. And so, he thought, it couldn’t have had anything to do with his sister’s death and Brandon’s. Because if it did, there was more than a single killer – which meant a conspiracy. To murder infants.
The idea was unthinkable, and yet, there it was:
Marion Kerr – C.B.
Bressingham, B.C.
He needed a cup of coffee, and knew where he could find one. Walking back to his room, he removed a packet of Nescafé from the frigo bar and boiled a cup of water, using a heating element that the pensione had thoughtfully provided.
He didn’t know what to think. The Kerr entry suggested – proved – there was more than one killer, and it was impossible not to think that Umbra Domini, Bepi’s death, and the beating he’d taken in Naples were all part of the same fabric. But when he tried to come up with why, what possible reason . . . his mind went blank.
Nescafé in hand, he returned to the lobby, where his computer waited, glowing in the dark.
For the next three hours he kept going. He knew he was becoming unreliable, and had to force himself to double-check each page. Even so, his mind wandered, and on occasion he caught himself turning a page without ever having focused on it, his concentration dissipated in a mist of fatigue. When that happened, he forced himself to go back through the pages to the last name he’d logged and start over from there.
It was three-thirty in the morning when he realized, dimly, that he’d found a pattern, or the edges of a pattern. But he wouldn’t let himself think about it until he’d logged all of the clinic’s patients into his computer – because then he’d confine himself to entries that fit the pattern. When he finally reached the end, the sky was beginning to brighten outside the lobby’s window.
He was wiped out. He closed the leather cover of the guest register and got to his feet, stretched so hard that something in his ribs actually made a sound. He turned off the light and walked back to his room.
There, he did what he’d not allowed himself to do before – segregate the oocyte procedures, the women who’d stayed at the pensione for a month or more, from the 272 names on the list. The double asterisks stood him in good stead, and with the computer’s help it took only a few
minutes to compile a list of eighteen names:
Kathleen Lassiter
Hannah Reiner
Matilda Henderson
Adriana Peña
Lillian Kerr . . .
Five that he recognized were dead. And their children were dead. And all of them had died in flames.
He closed his eyes. Brandon rose up in his mind. Uncle Joe! Uncle Joe! Watch me! I can do a sum-salt. Watch me! The little body tumbled crookedly over; it wasn’t a somersault at all, just a little kid clumsily rolling over on the rug, but Brandon jumped up like an Olympic gymnast, his hands thrust to the sky in victory, his smile beaming with pride.
Lassiter looked at the list again. The women were mostly from the United States and Western Europe, but there were a handful from other places: Hong Kong, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Rabat, Rio.
He moved the computer to the desk beside the window and plugged the modem into the telephone. Using the N-cipher program, he encrypted cbguest.1st and sent it to his office in Washington. Then he wrote a short memo to Judy Rifkin, giving her the names and addresses of the eighteen patients whose names he’d listed. He told her to notify Riordan that at least five of the women on the list were dead, and that all of the others might therefore be in danger. Riordan should contact the authorities in whatever jurisdictions were involved, and have the women and children placed in protective custody. Lassiter planned to return in a day or two, when he’d explain everything.
Meanwhile, he wanted Judy to organize a dossier on the late Dr. Ignazio Baresi, of Montecastello, Italy. Anything she could find on the Clinica Baresi and a fertility technique called ‘oocyte donation’ would also be helpful. Finally, he asked her to backstop Riordan by trying to contact the thirteen women on the list. If the cops were on top of things, none of the women would be available. Which was just the way he wanted it.
The memo was two pages long, and when he’d sent it to Judy, he desperately wanted to sleep. But it was the weekend, and there was a chance that Judy might not check her E-mail until Monday morning. He looked at his watch. It was almost five-thirty in the morning – eleven-thirty at night in Washington. Reaching for the telephone, he dialed Judy’s number at home. There were four long rings, and then her answering machine came on. When the long beep sounded, he said, ‘Judy – Joe. Check your E-mail right away. It’s urgent. I’ll see you in a couple of days.’
He pulled off his clothes and lay back on the bed like a swimmer doing the backstroke. Shutting his eyes against the thin morning light, he listened to himself breathe and waited to lose consciousness.
But his mind was at the races. He saw Marie Sanders, holding her little boy’s hand. The kid’s eyes were the color of mahogany. Brown and bottomless, and they stared up at him, as if from a well. And then Brandon’s carbonized face flashed through his mind, and he heard Tommy Truong’s voice: No blood left in this little boy. He thought of Jiri Reiner’s hopeless gaze. And Kara Baker’s tears.
Jesus Christ, he thought, pulling the covers over his head. It’s a fucking massacre.
27
IT WAS ELEVEN o’clock when he climbed out of bed, and the first thing that occurred to him was that he needed a good night’s sleep – instead of the few hours he’d gotten. But a quick shower took care of that, needling his face with a flood of hot water, massaging his shoulders, rinsing him clean. He didn’t want to take the time to shave, but thought better of it. Priests could be funny. Or so he supposed. He didn’t really know.
He put on his leather jacket and went down to the lobby. Nigel complained of a hangover, but pointed him in the direction of the square where he’d find the church, ‘and a café.’
It was cold out, maybe forty degrees, and raw with the threat of a rain. He turned left outside the pensione, walking north along a narrow cobbled street. There were no sidewalks and no cars, just a wall of gray stone houses on either side, their shutters and doors closed against the winter air.
He didn’t like it, much. In winter Montecastello seemed as menacing as it was beautiful. Over the centuries, the foundations of the houses had shifted, and now they seemed to lean toward each other, crouching above the street. As Lassiter turned down one lane and up a second, it occurred to him that the town was a maze, the kind of place in which it would be easy to get lost but hard to hide.
He passed one unmarked store, and then another. There were no signs anywhere, perhaps because there was no need to advertise: everyone in town must know everyone else, and everyone would know what everyone else was selling. Each of the stores buzzed with fluorescent lights behind doorways strung with strands of plastic beads. With a ripple and a click, an old man stepped through one of the doorways into the street, carrying a bag of vegetables, packages wrapped in butcher’s paper, and a loaf of bread. ‘Ciao,’ he said, with his eyes on the ground, and hurried away.
One more turn and Lassiter emerged from the warren of little streets into the open space of Montecastello’s main square, the Piazza di San Fortunato. His destination, the Church of San Giovanni Decollato, occupied all of the north side of the small square. It was a simple, even austere, building, built with the same gray stone that was everywhere else in town. Lassiter was about to climb the steps to the church when the smell of coffee hit him and he turned.
Across from the church was a hole-in-the-wall café with a beaded entrance, and metal tables and chairs in the street in front of it. This was obviously the center for retail sin in Montecastello, combining the functions of a snack bar, newsstand, video arcade, saloon, coffeehouse, and tabacchi – within the confines of a single room. Despite the chill, Lassiter sat down at an outside table and ordered an espresso.
Though the air was cold, it was also quite still – and it might have been quiet, as well, if it were not for the insistent beep of a Pac-Man game filtering out of the café. The square was shielded on three sides by buildings. The fourth side was part of the town wall, a low parapet about four feet high that looked out over the Umbrian plain.
At the next table a pair of middle-aged workmen sat, playing cards. They wore close-fitting, woolen jackets buttoned up over so many other layers of clothes that they had an upholstered look. Sipping coffee and brandy by turns, they cursed quietly, muttered to themselves, and joked about the hands that fate had dealt them.
As he waited for his coffee, Lassiter glanced at the rack of newspapers that stood outside the café. There were at least a dozen papers held in place by metal clips, but nothing in English. A three-day-old Le Monde – but he didn’t feel up to it. He was trying to decide whether or not to use a pretext in his interview with the priest. And what to say. Tell me everything you know about Dr. Baresi? He shook his head.
His coffee arrived, and as he sipped it, he watched the workmen playing cards. The deck was so very old that it had a texture almost like cloth. Left to themselves, the cards would have collapsed in the players’ hands, revealing every denomination. So each of the men propped them up with the fingers of his second hand, cupping the cards from behind.
Both men, with their sun-darkened skin and lattices of wrinkles around their eyes, had obviously spent their lives outdoors. They looked vigorous and, somehow, sardonic, eyes and teeth bright in their dark faces.
He tried to imagine a place in America where two such as these might sit outside, minding their business in the daylight hours, drinking coffee and brandy and playing cards. In January. No place came to mind except, perhaps, a beery workingman’s bar, and that wasn’t the same thing at all.
In the center of the square was a simple fountain, a rectangular stone basin elevated a couple of feet from the ground. Mounted on its single vertical wall was a tattered bas-relief, a lion’s head. Its mouth was cracked, so that instead of a stream arching into the basin, a burble of water came out. Even so, the fountain was functional, and more than an ornament. Lassiter watched an elderly woman fill two plastic jugs with water, square her shoulders, and then walk away.
He ordered a second coffee, and wandered over to the parape
t while it was being prepared. Below him the land fell almost vertically. It was mostly rock, any earth having long since eroded away; a few scraggly pine trees managed to grow in the stony soil.
In the distance, just above the nearby pines, was Todi, almost floating in the sky. Its walls girdled the mountainside in a series of diagonal planes, climbing the hill to the city itself. There was a messy expanse below that – Todi’s urban sprawl – and then order was restored by a crazy quilt of agricultural plots that ran all the way down to the river.
It was a sweet sight, touched with a weird nostalgia for something that, after all, he’d never known. It was a long time since farming had been like this in the United States, if it ever had, and the view of a quilted American landscape was available only from twenty thousand feet. He blamed the nostalgia on Cézanne.
Closer to him, on this side of the river, was the manmade forest he’d driven past, with its geometric lines of trees. He could see where the road forked, one fork heading toward the Clinica Baresi – or what was left of it – and the other to Montecastello. He followed that road with his eyes until it disappeared into the steep configuration of the hill. It emerged a few hundred feet below him, at the little park. He could even see his car – the silver one, right there.
Returning to the café, he found his second espresso waiting and, standing, drank it in a single gulp. Sliding five thousand lire under the saucer, he crossed the square toward the church.
Lassiter climbed the steps and went through a heavy wooden door that gave access to a sort of foyer, an anteroom. A wooden wall, with an entryway into the church at either end, separated the world of prayer from that of the world outside. The room was a buffer, and a clearinghouse of sorts, containing an old wooden table with tidy stacks of leaflets, and a metal box for donations. He shoved some bills into the box, and walked around the wall into the church proper.
It was surprisingly dark, and at first he could see nothing but the ceiling, high above. Candle smoke and mold filled his nostrils, and he could hear the murmur of low voices, coming from the front of the church where the altar must be.