“Sepsis?”
“Doubt it. The epithelial cells lining the smaller airways were mostly gone. Poof. The few cells that were left aren’t consistent with sepsis.” Ben turned a steak. “But I haven’t told you the kicker.”
“What?”
“Even though the airways were all shot to hell, the lung tissue itself was normal. The alveoli, the air sacs — completely normal. Whatever this was, it attacked just one type of cell — the epithelial cells lining that boy’s airways.”
“Then why couldn’t we ventilate the patient? If the lung tissue was spared, how’d he die?”
Charlie erupted inside the house. “Open your eyes, guys. Ever heard of passing the ball?”
“Fluid and debris,” Ben said while handing a tray to Luke. “Here. Hold this.”
“Fluid and debris? I’m not following.”
“There was a thin layer of fluid and debris in the lungs — a slurry of dead tissue from the airways that followed gravity and flowed into the alveolar air sacs.”
Luke rotated the platter as Ben loaded it with steaks.
“You were able to push oxygen into the boy’s lungs,” Ben continued, “but it couldn’t get through the fluid and debris. The oxygen never got into his bloodstream. That’s almost certainly what killed him.” Ben pointed at the door. “It’s getting cold. Let’s take our little chat inside.”
Luke followed Ben into the kitchen, placed the platter on a kitchen counter, and the two of them went into the living room.
“Any idea how this ties into the boy’s pancreatic enzymes being elevated?”
“Nope.” Ben stooped to set some logs in the fireplace.
Luke stood at the front window, glancing up and down the street. “So, what’s your best guess? What caused the boy’s death?”
“I don’t have a guess at this point. You got something attacking this boy’s airways while leaving the lung tissue alone. Doesn’t look like an infection, at least no infection I’ve ever seen. Maybe some kind of autoimmune reaction, but again, I’ve never seen anything like it. That’s about all I can tell you.”
“So, unless the blood cultures turn up something, we’re at a dead end?”
Ben stuffed a wad of newspaper under the logs. “Maybe not.”
“What do you mean?”
Ben lit a match and touched the flame to one end of the paper. “You asked me to call the coroner about what happened with the autopsy, remember?”
“And?”
“I called him ‘bout an hour ago, just before you got here.” He stood and brushed his palms. “Turns out he’s the one that was talking to the consulate. He didn’t really add anything to what we already know—”
“So how does that help us?”
“Just hold on,” Ben said. “So, the coroner and I got to talking about this case and I tell him about these lung findings. He’s one of the brightest bulbs I know. I was interested in his opinion, ya know?”
Luke nodded while staring out the front window. There was a dark van directly across the street from Ben’s home, and two cars parked ahead of it. Neither of the cars was a Ford Mustang.
“It turns out,” Ben continued, “that the coroner had a case with similar lung findings — a Jane Doe case. It was a few months back.”
Luke turned to the pathologist. “A woman?”
“A young girl.”
“Did they ever identity the body?”
“He doesn’t think so,” Ben said. “Oh, and by the way, the only similarity with our boy seems to be the lung tissues, so don’t get your hopes up. He was sure their girl didn’t have leukemia. Like I said, it’s a long shot, but I think I’ll stop by and take a look at what they have.”
“When?”
“Sometime tomorrow, probably. I have to call the M.E. who’s handling the case, arrange a time.”
“Good. It so happens I have nothing to do tomorrow.” Luke turned back toward the street. In the relief of the dim streetlights, it looked as if the van’s side doors were ajar.
Ben gave an exaggerated sigh. “I knew I was going to regret telling you about—”
“Do any of your neighbors own a van?” Luke broke in. “Blue, or maybe dark green?”
“A van? What’re you talking about?”
Headlight beams from an approaching car painted the van’s length with a pale swath of light. The van’s side doors were open — just barely, no more than a few inches. The gap narrowed to a sliver as the car passed.
Luke bolted for the entry hall, threw open the front door and ran outside.
By the time Luke reached the stoop of Ben’s front lawn, the van had already pulled away from the curb with its lights off and was accelerating up the street.
“Son of a bitch,” he whispered breathlessly.
* * *
Calderon was two blocks from Ben Wilson’s home when his cell phone rang.
“Yes?”
“You sound out of breath,” Mr. Kong observed.
“McKenna spotted me. I had to break off surveillance.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Tell me about that young woman doctor — Callahan.”
“A cab just dropped her at the international terminal,” Mr. Kong said. “Do you want me to follow her, see if I can get on the same flight?”
“No. I need you here,” Calderon said. “But call down to the project site. Send a team out to that clinic. It’s time to take care of this problem.”
* * *
When Luke arrived home two hours later, he drove a quarter mile past his duplex before making a U-turn and retracing his path. There were seven vehicles parked on his block, and he lingered as he passed each one. He knew his in-your-face countersurveillance methods would gain him nothing, but he did it anyway to vent his anger.
He had downplayed the incident with Ben, saying only that the van had looked suspicious. Ben’s overly indulgent head nods had only confirmed that Luke’s explanation didn’t pass muster, but he wasn’t ready to tell anyone—even Ben — that Lloyd Erickson had hired a private investigator to snoop around and meddle in his life.
Even more troubling, though, was the possibility that someone other than the football player’s P.I. had been parked outside Ben’s home. It was a dark van that he had seen, not the blue Ford Mustang that Sammy had described to him. And if Sammy was right — if Erickson’s strategy was to paint Luke as an erratic character — why would the investigator waste his time following him into a quiet neighborhood at night?
But if not Erickson’s investigator, then who was parked across from Ben’s home? A city like L.A. rendered the possibilities almost endless: car thieves, prostitutes and their johns, drug peddlers, garden-variety punks, drunken revelers. And they made up only the beginning of the list.
The LAPD was also on that list, but the possibility that he was a suspect in Kate’s murder seemed farfetched, even after his ill-timed visit to her home. In any case, homicide detectives wouldn’t have cut and run when he ran out of Ben’s house.
By the time Luke finally pulled into his driveway, he was no closer to an answer, and growing tired of his own ruminations.
Maybe his father was right. Maybe he did overthink everything.
When he climbed the stairs to this duplex, he found a card stuffed into the doorjamb.
It was Detective O’Reilly’s business card. Luke had completely forgotten about the detective after Ben’s phone call that afternoon. A handwritten note on the back of the card instructed him to call O’Reilly’s office tomorrow after 7:00 A.M.
Luke glanced at his entry table as soon as he opened the front door. In the upper right-hand corner of his answering machine, a red 1 showed on the SAVED MESSAGES display: Kate’s message.
The NEW MESSAGES display in the lower corner was also lit. It was flashing 1. He pressed PLAY and listened as Detective O’Reilly asked him to return the call.
If it wasn’t already ten-fifteen, he would have called the detective. The sooner they copied Kate’s
message, the sooner he could erase it. For a while, at least, he didn’t want to think about her death.
A burst of raindrops clattered on the roof.
It rained all night.
19
“Someone steal your furniture?” Ben was standing in Luke’s entry, looking through the archway into his sparsely furnished living room. “Or is this some sort of minimalist thing you got going here?”
Luke looked at his watch: 8:33 A.M. “We’re going to be late for our meeting with the M.E.”
Ben’s gaze moved among several paintings on the walls. “Looks like you spend all your money on art. Are these all by the same artist?”
“Yeah.” It’d been a long while since he had taken the time to appreciate the watercolors that his mother had painted.
“Nice. Sorta reminds me of New England,” Ben observed.
Continuing the disconnected conversation, Luke said, “Nice buckle.”
Ben was wearing an enormous oval belt buckle with a raised outline of Texas and some kind of gemstone in the shape of a star. It looked as if it probably weighed ten pounds.
His friend tilted the buckle toward himself and polished it with the sleeve of his shirt.
Luke jerked his thumb in the direction of the door. “Let’s go.”
They rode in Ben’s recently purchased gold Cadillac DTS. Loretta Lynn was twanging from the speakers when, ten minutes later, they took the Mission Road exit on Interstate 5. Luke had pulled his sun visor down and flipped open the mirror, studying the vehicles behind them for tails.
He pulled a Mr. Goodbar from his shirt pocket and started unfolding the wrapper.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Ben said. “Not while you’re sitting on gen-u-ine calf leather seats.”
Before Luke had finished rewrapping his chocolate bar, they pulled into a parking lot adjacent to a plain beige warehouse-like building at the northeast corner of the L.A. County/USC medical campus — home to the Los Angeles County Coroner.
“Who’re we meeting?” Luke asked.
“Some Indian fella with a long name.”
The county morgue was not a place that many people visited by choice, and they found a parking space right next to the entrance. As they walked up the front steps, sunlight bounced off Ben’s belt buckle and cast a bright reflection that Luke figured would scorch any insect in its path. A man walking down the steps sidestepped the beam of light as if to avoid injury.
When they reached the information desk, Ben pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket, tried three times to pronounce the scribbled name, then gave up and handed the paper to the receptionist.
A few minutes later Dr. Jainarayan Majumdar was leading them down a flight of stairs to the basement level. The deputy medical examiner had dark skin and spoke with a slight British accent.
“So,” Ben said to their host, “do you have a nickname that won’t break my tongue?”
Luke shot a look at Ben.
Ben responded with an argumentative twitch.
“Jay,” the M.E. replied without a hint of offense. “Everyone calls me Jay.”
Autopsy Room B-3 was at the end of a long hallway. The last time Luke had been in a morgue was during medical school. At the time, he couldn’t fathom why anyone would choose this line of work. His opinion hadn’t changed. The room was about the size of a large dungeon, and filled with death. Seven stainless steel autopsy tables stretched out along its length, each with generous amounts of floor space around it. A large meat scale hung above the center of each table. Every work area had two water faucets, and one of the spigots on each countertop had a hose wrapped around it. At the far end of the room a long row of rubberized aprons hung from wooden hooks.
Four of the autopsy tables had occupants. Thick plastic sheets covered three of the naked corpses. The fourth was being disassembled by a pathologist or technician whose expression was as disinterested as his client’s.
As Jay led them into a meeting room at the far end of the autopsy lab, Luke asked, “Is the girl’s body still here?”
“No, no. It was interred several weeks ago.”
They took seats around a conference table.
“On the table in front of you are copies of our report,” Jay said. “I don’t know how much you know—”
“Just to be safe, assume we know nothing.” Ben grabbed the report and started thumbing through it.
“Then let’s start with a brief summary,” the M.E. began. “This is a Jane Doe case, a girl we estimate to have been about eight or nine years old, based on her bone age. The body was found just outside the entrance to a small hospital, on one of those frontage roads that runs along the Santa Ana Freeway.”
Jay handed a stack of eight-by-ten photographs to Ben. “Here are the pictures from the scene. Notice the way the body is propped up against a wall, in the sitting position. There were no signs of trauma, and it may be that whoever left her there was hoping someone would find her and take her into the hospital. Note the pattern of lividity — the blood had pooled on the underside of the buttocks and legs, the distal aspects of both arms, and the chin, which was bent forward and resting against the chest. All of this suggests to us—”
“That the girl was still alive when she was left there,” Ben broke in.
“Exactly. It’s anyone’s guess, but we think it may have been a coyote drop.”
Ben’s left eyebrow arched. “A what?”
“A smuggler that brings illegals across the border,” Luke explained.
“What tells you that she was an illegal?” Ben asked.
“Well, to begin with, she’s almost certainly not a U.S. citizen. Her clothing was made from a non fire-retardant weave that’s illegal in the US, and her underwear was stitched by hand with no elastic bands. I’m jumping ahead here, but she also had two intestinal parasites — ascariasis and trichuriasis — as well as widely disseminated trichinella cysts in her muscles. Of course, she could have picked up any one of those in the U.S., but all three? Not likely. She probably lived in a region endemic for those parasites.”
Luke said, “I don’t see how that gets you to the conclusion that a smuggler brought her across the border.”
“Just playing the odds,” Jay replied. “It’s rare that no one steps forward to claim the body of a young child, but we’ve had it happen with families that entered the country illegally, families that are afraid to go to the authorities.”
“Any idea where she was from?” Luke asked.
“Phenotypically, her facial contours suggest a fairly pure Indian lineage. Could be almost anywhere in Central or South America.”
Luke thought about Josue Chaca. “Any tattoos on the body?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Jay said. “On the lower abdomen, three small circles. We spoke with a forensic anthropologist about that. It’s described in the report.”
Ben handed Luke a picture of the corpse, then flipped through the pages of the report. “Here it is,” he said. “It says, ‘The location and gender suggest some kind of fertility symbol. These types of markings are occasionally seen among Mayan tribes in Guatemala, as well as Inca tribes in Peru and Ecuador.’ ”
Jay said, “Why do you ask about tattoos?”
“The boy I saw in our E.R.,” Luke said, “had one on the left side of his chest, shaped like a crescent moon.”
Ben was looking at the report. “I see that you looked for toxins.”
“Yes, but we found nothing. Serum analysis, tissue analysis, hair analysis — all negative. In fact, just about everything we’ve looked for has been a dead end. We know that the mechanism of death was asphyxia, but the disease or injury that caused the asphyxia is still a mystery.”
The medical examiner opened a folder of tissue slides and slid one into a projection device at the center of the table.
An image appeared on the screen. “The interesting findings were found on the microscopic exam — specifically, in the bone marrow, lungs, pancreas, and bile ducts. As you can see on this
slide, the bone marrow is hyperproliferative, primarily lymphocytic precursors, and cellularity is very high — over ninety percent.”
“What does all that mean?” Luke asked.
“This marrow is unusual in several respects,” Jay said. “I’m still not sure what it is or what it means, but I can tell you what it isn’t. It’s not leukemia, and it’s not a toxin — at least, none that I’ve ever seen. It’s probably not an infection — viral, bacterial, and fungal cultures of the bone marrow were all negative.”
“You can’t test for everything,” Luke said. “There’ve got to be some toxins that aren’t included in your testing methods.”
“That’s always a possibility, but unlikely in this case. Let me show you a section of the lungs, and I think you’ll understand.” Jay removed one slide from the projector and replaced it with another. “This is a section of the upper airways, the trachea. As you can see, it’s virtually normal.” Again he changed slides. “Now we’re looking at—”
“I’ll be damned,” Ben whispered.
“—bronchioles in the lower airways of the lungs. The epithelial cells — see here? For the most part, they’re gone. They’re just not there.”
Ben shot a glance at Luke.
Jay aimed a laser pointer at a specific area on the slide. “Now, look here. There’s an overwhelming infiltration of white blood cells into the surrounding tissues, almost all lymphocytes. I didn’t believe it at first, so I took several additional sections of lung. Every section of lung looks like this.”
Ben leaned forward, grabbed an eyebrow and started playing with it. “That’s not artifact. That’s real.”
Jay nodded. “So Luke, getting back to your question about toxins, it’s difficult for me to imagine a toxin that would spare the upper airways and selectively attack the lower airways. It’s more likely that we’re dealing with a biological agent of some sort.”
“I assume you cultured the lung tissue?” Ben said.
“Yes. Lung cultures were all negative,” Jay said. “Except for the parasites that I already told you about, the only infectious organism we found was in her nasal secretions. It was a garden-variety rhinovirus.”
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