Barely a Crime

by Robert Ovies

  “What?”

  “I think it spun his head around when I told him we know his name, his company, what he does there; we know about his niece and his sister, where he lives, all of that. I think his brain was tumbling down the stairs so fast that for a few minutes one idea was bumping into another. He got it back, but for a minute there he lost his ground. And it showed. I think he was scrambling and that’s what came up. Maybe on the spot, ‘cause he’s not used to scrambling, or maybe it was in his pocket so it would be ready to use whenever he needed it, but the kid’s not dying of cancer. Uh-uh. . .”

  “Hell, Crawl. . .”

  “But he is smart. Probably a genius. And he’s thought it out right. And it looks like it’ll actually work. I think it’ll work and I’m all in. But—and this is what he said—the girl doesn’t even know about her cancer yet. Right? That’s exactly what he said. You heard him say that, right?”

  Kieran thought about it, then nodded, just slightly.

  “So she’s dead in thirty days if he can’t get the miracle blood to heal her,” Crawl said, “but she doesn’t even know she’s got damned cancer yet?”

  “I feel bad for her,” Kieran said quietly. “Is that what you mean? She’s only sixteen.”

  “Listen to this again,” Crawl said. “And this time put your brain in gear. He says he loves her so much that he’s spent a year or two, or whatever, finding the right people, and researching the shroud, getting measurements and building exact replicas of everything, which must have cost a fortune, and getting this house, and building polished metal cases, and designing indestructible polycarbonate covers, and bringing in special-ops lasers from Korea, for God’s sake. . . because, he says to us, ‘Oh, I have to save my niece, I love her so much!’ But he never got her into a doctor about the cancer? He never got her any treatment? Never even asked her if she wanted any? She never got any meds that she might ask about, like, ‘What’s going on with me, Uncle John?’ Never an IV? Never any chemo or anything else? And all the time, with all his money, he could have taken her to anybody, any place in the world, any time he wanted?”

  “Hell,” Kieran whispered. He was staring. His mouth was hanging slightly open.

  “And his sister doesn’t tell her, either?” Crawl said. “Like. . . what? She doesn’t know, either? And the girl’s just a few weeks away from dying, and she can’t figure it out for herself? Have you ever seen anybody who’s just a month away from dying with cancer who doesn’t know they damn well better see a doctor?”

  He brought out his phone.

  “Michael?” Kieran asked.

  “That’s why we got the thing, right? Yeah, Michael.”

  “The kid could be mental,” Kieran said. “Maybe he’s mental too. But the sister would have to be too, wouldn’t she?”

  “The point is,” Crawl said, pausing before entering Michael’s number, “if getting the kid cured of cancer isn’t the real reason behind this operation, it means he’s doing it for some other reason. End of story. If it’s not her, it’s something else. And that something else is really, really, really important to him.”

  He looked down and entered Michael’s number. He muttered, “She’s not even a part of this. No way.”

  Michael answered on the fifth ring.

  Crawl cupped his hand over the phone. “It’s me, Michael!” He wandered another five yards away from the now-distant house. “Everything’s going good, but we need to find out a couple of things again, soon. Two, three days, max.”

  “Everything’s okay, though?” Michael asked.

  “Yeah, we’re with the guy, and it’s okay. We think. But we need to know something right away or it might be going totally sideways.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “No names, no details, all right? Not over a phone.”

  “Okay. So what do you need?”

  “You said the man we talked about has a niece. . .”

  “Yeah. Lives with him.”

  “I need the kid’s medical history.”

  “The girl?”

  “The niece, yeah. Last few years, last six months, even. We need to know if she’s spent any time in a hospital, or missed any school, and when, and for how long, because he says she’s so sick with cancer she’s dying, and we don’t believe him. And it’s important we find out for sure.”

  “He says it’s cancer?”

  “Cancer. She’s dead in a month from now is what he says. Like they’ve started the countdown on her.”

  “Their hospital would probably be in Albuquerque. It’s a lot bigger than Santa Fe’s, which would be closer. Don’t know if it’s better, though. They wouldn’t have many choices except those two, unless he flew her somewhere for special treatments. But even if he did that, they’d have had her in the one in Albuquerque or Santa Fe first.”

  “And she’d miss a block of school.”

  “Oh hell, for sure.”

  “Find out, okay?”

  “Databases are easy.”

  “Let me know if it costs you.”

  “Can’t be much, if anything.”

  “Fly in if you have to. It’s that important.”

  “You need it by when?”

  “Sometime in the next three days. But don’t call me. Keep your phone close and I’ll call you.”

  “Any time.”

  “If you can, find out something else for us too. You can get it from there, straight as a rope, and it’s just as important.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How long does DNA last in dried blood?”

  Kieran’s eyes were suddenly wide and staring and pounding with questions.

  Crawl glanced at him and grinned.

  Michael asked, “This is serious stuff, isn’t it?”

  “Serious but not scary,” Crawl said. “I’m not talking anyone’s blood in particular. But I’m asking you to do a dive into it, as quick as you can. Dry conditions, warm temperatures, just laying in something and drying out. In fact, blood, and maybe tiny bits of bone, too. Tiny stuff. How long does the DNA stay good, or whatever they call it? So they can try and do something with it before it rots away?”

  Michael didn’t answer for several seconds. Then he said, “Where are you calling from? In Italy, I know, but where in Italy?”

  “Not now, Michael.”

  Kieran whispered, “What the hell?” and began to pace: five feet away, five feet back; five feet away, five feet back.

  “Okay,” Michael said. “I’ll get you details as quick as I can.”

  “And I’ll call you, right?” Crawl said. “Not the other way around.”

  Michael paused. “Later,” he said and was gone.

  Before Crawl could put his phone back into his pocket, Kieran was all over him. “Tell me what the hell you’re thinking, wall-to-wall, top-to-bottom,” he said. “Now’s the time, damn it.”

  But Crawl didn’t answer immediately. He went back to biting slowly on his bottom lip and turned to stare again at the darkened house with the pictures of the shroud and with the doctor who was lying to them.

  When he finally spoke, he spoke cautiously, like someone who knows where he wants to go but has to feel his way in the dark to get there. “The man is willing to risk everything he has just to get at that blood,” he said. He paused, thinking. Then, “The same man has put twenty years into a worldwide company that’s focused on one thing. The ins and outs of DNA. What can be done with DNA.” He paused again. “The same man is a genius, probably. State of the art company, state of the art facility, state of the art research, and just two feet away not that long ago from getting the damn Nobel Prize.”

  When he finally turned to look again at Kieran, his eyes were narrowed and dark and sharp. “I don’t think he wants the blood so he can heal his niece,” he said. “I think he wants the DNA that’s in the blood. I think he wants the DNA that’s in the blood because he thinks he can clone Jesus, and he knows more about it than we do. And he knows, for sure, that if he can clone Jesus on
ce, he can clone him ten thousand times!”

  The picture was on Marie’s dresser, framed in silver: an eight-by-ten color print of her mother and father standing in front of a wall of orange rock in Sedona, Arizona; her mother holding one-year-old Marie scrunched close to her cheek, and her mother and father both smiling warm, broad smiles, their eyes radiating affection.

  Her mother, whose name was Katie, looked the way Marie thought she would look someday, maybe in a second sixteen years. At least she hoped so. Older but not old. A little heavier. Her black hair longer. Beautiful though, at least in Marie’s opinion, largely because of the way her mother’s eyes smiled as much as her lips.

  She remembered her mother’s smile. Her touch. The warmth of her body. Her hands being warm even when it was cold outside. And she remembered the sweet rhythm of her voice, which, Marie felt certain, must have been embedded into her while she was still in her mother’s womb, and which would always resonate with her in ways she could neither know nor understand.

  Her father, Hugh Groves, was also good-looking, somebody she would have been proud to walk into school with. He was muscular and taller than her mother by a good six inches, with short brown hair that wasn’t parted, and thick dark eyebrows.

  About her father, Marie remembered, in order of importance: first, he played games with her in the backyard and laughed a lot and made her laugh; second, he had scratchy whiskers she liked to rub; third, the muscles on his arms made her feel safe whenever he hugged her; and fourth, he smelled different from anyone else. Not bad, but very different.

  She didn’t realize until she was seven or eight that her father’s unique aroma was actually the smell of cigarettes.

  While her current room was filled with charcoal drawings that she had sketched and still treasured, the photo was her prized possession. Not only because it showed Marie and her parents together, but also because of the way they were smiling. She was convinced that even though they were smiling at a camera lens, they were consciously, really and truly, with forethought, meaning those smiles for her, today. They knew the picture would be kept. They knew she would be the one keeping it. And they were smiling for her now, exactly where she was in this moment. She drew so much strength from the power of this conviction, and from the love in their smiles, that there was simply no other possibility.

  She lay on her bed, gazing at her strongest hold on life for nearly ten minutes. Then, strengthened, she got up, put on her black sweat shirt, grabbed her layout pad and a thin box of charcoals and slipped out of the room. She was quiet going down the stairs, and she left by the front door, not the back. The back would have taken her too close to her uncle and aunt. She circled the house on the south side and walked into the woods.

  Pines towered around her like guardian soldiers. Their fallen needles, long and brown, muted her steps like a rug. Bars of sunlight shined in air that smelled as sweet as herbal tea. To Marie’s right, the lake, emerald-blue in the afternoon sun and barely wrinkled along its edges, sent baby waves inching up the soft, grassy shore in a slow and peaceful rhythm.

  In this place she loved most of all the places along the lake, she sat with her back against her favorite grandfather pine, drew her knees up to her chest and opened her drawing pad to a picture she had already begun.

  Like nearly everything she drew, it was a coming together of varied elements, animate and inanimate, earth, water and sky, the old and the new, everything in the soft lines of black and white communion.

  She withdrew her charcoal, studying her rendered hill of tall trees blending to become the sinew and veins of an old man’s muscular neck. His lean, smiling face was Marie’s picture of a grandfather’s face, bearded and serene, the person inside eminently accessible, always. Accessible. That had to be seen in the eyes. That was what she would try to capture more clearly today, in her soul-place by the lake.

  Tomorrow, and the next day and the next, until the drawing was complete, the grandfather’s gray hair would flair into needles and leaves, as if he were the greatest of all the trees that had ever been; and all that he was would be folded into the clouds with a single bird in the air above, as there was so often a single bird in Marie’s charcoal world.

  And it would endure. She would have it captured on paper, and so it would all endure: the earth and the trees, the grandfather and the sky, the clouds, the bird, all the beautiful things, all knitted together one more time.

  She liked that, bringing everything together, and keeping it that way, so she smiled.

  Beyond the water, two Pecos Wilderness mountains parted to form a perfect valley. It was as if they had taken their places intentionally so that she and others like her could come into the wonder of this place and enjoy a perfect view of South Truchas Peak—the more than thirteen thousand feet of granite skyline, where bighorn sheep outnumbered people and the elk roamed as free as the birds swooping and swirling in the “V” of the valley, close to the water.

  High overhead, framed by the valley with the great mountain as a backdrop, a single large bird soared, its wingspan seven feet, at least. She had seen this one before, perhaps a dozen times, and her heart soared at the sight of it. It hovered for the longest time, then it dipped and slowly turned, so smoothly, and then it rose again and hovered again, and all without any apparent effort.

  Marie let her eyes close.

  She would miss the magic of this place near the lake when she flew away, as she knew that she would, certainly in another couple of years. She would miss this special place very much.

  She would have to bring Terry here, too, she thought, when he came to visit her.

  When she opened her eyes, nearly fifteen minutes had passed. The old man of the mountain and the tree was smiling at her. She smiled back. Raising her eyes to look at the sky between the mountains, she was surprised to see a second long-winged bird, the same size, the same kind, gliding very close to the first. It was something she had not seen before: two of them together.

  She watched them for a long time, admired their hanging in midair, gliding earthward, turning, rising and then hanging again like pieces of a mobile. So beautiful. But where had the second one come from? Where had it been all the other times she had been to this special soul-place by the lake?

  “Not as planned,” she whispered with a soft smile. “But two is really nice.”

  9

  After three days of rehearsals, three days of studying maps and detailed schematics of Turin’s Saint John the Baptist Cathedral and its Chapel of the Shroud, three days of studying the routes in and out, three days of practiced lasers and practiced timings and practiced individual roles, and three days of getting on each other’s nerves and finding measured ways past those minor flash points, they were ready. They each knew what to do, they each knew how to do it and they each knew, with agreed-upon reasons why, what not to do along the way.

  Crawl and Kieran had what little gear they needed gathered and in the Fiat by 1:50 A.M., and they left for Turin, traveling in between the doctor’s Mercedes and Antonio’s green Opel, at exactly 2:00 A.M. on Thursday morning.

  They hadn’t yet talked again with Michael, but they weren’t about to pass on the doctor’s additional payment of forty-five thousand pounds each no matter what the outcome of Marie’s health or any details about DNA housed in blood. The job, they had confirmed yet again, was well planned, well equipped, well practiced, and, while there was some risk, certainly, what little risk they could anticipate did not, in their minds, outweigh the treasure now parked in the bank and waiting for both of them.

  In a small cloth bag, they were taking with them two pairs of blue surgical gloves, each with a dab of gel inside the end of every finger, and two pairs of black cloth shoe covers; everything fingerprint-proof and easily disposable. Their two travel bags were on the floor of the Fiat’s back seat, ready for their return to Milan. A separate backpack rested on the back seat of the passenger side, ready to go to work in the presence of the shroud. Everything else that any of t
hem would need was either in the backpacks Antonio had in his Opel or in the case the doctor would take in to extract his needed traces of blood from the shroud.

  Crawl and Kieran had already driven their route to the cathedral in daylight, both to get used to driving on what, to them, was the wrong side of the road, and to practice their exit from Turin toward Milan.

  Given their planned speed limit to Saint John the Baptist Cathedral, they would be face-to-face with the figure on the shroud in fifty minutes, at exactly 2:50 A.M.

  Crawl was driving. Kieran was beside him, bobbing his right knee up and down mechanically; something Crawl had never noticed him do before.

  The three vehicles didn’t bunch together too tightly. They just kept in sight of one another at a little over the speed limit; not fast enough to get stopped, not slow enough to attract unwanted attention.

  After the job was finished, they would all be on their own. Crawl and Kieran would drive to Milan, Antonio would go to God-knew-where with the two lasers, which were going to be his payment for his part in the job and which, Crawl and Kieran had decided, would give the Italian more for the night’s work than both of them combined.

  The doctor, they believed, although without being told for sure, would be going back to New Mexico to see his niece, who may or may not really be dying.

  For their part, Crawl and Kieran had already confirmed that forty-three of each of their forty-five thousand pounds had been transferred into their bank accounts on schedule, as promised.

  “Remember,” Crawl said as they drew nearer to the city, “one of us watches the doc the whole way through. That’s all we can do.”

  Kieran’s knee slowed, but only slightly, and only for a second. “Antonio, too,” Kieran said. “Don’t let him leave early, whatever you do.”

  “He won’t leave early.”

  “He goes out early, fifteen brothers and cousins drop on us.”

  “He won’t leave early,” Crawl repeated.