by Jodi Picoult
There is a shoddy football stadium, an equally shoddy track, and a basketball court. Gideon is doing an admirable job of guarding some pansy-ass center six inches shorter than him. Quentin puts his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and watches his son steal the ball and shoot an effortless three-pointer.
The last time his son had picked up the phone to get in touch, he'd been calling from jail, busted for possession. And although it cost Quentin plenty of snide comments about nepotism, he'd gotten Gideon's sentence transmuted to a rehab facility. That hadn't been good enough for Gideon, though, who'd wanted to be released scot-free. "You're no use as a father," he'd told Quentin. "I should have known you'd be no use as a lawyer, either."
Now, a year later, Gideon high-fives another player and then turns around to see Quentin watching. "Shit, man," he mutters. "Time." The other kids fall to the sidelines, sucking on water bottles and shrugging off layers of clothes. Gideon approaches, arms crossed. "You come here to make me piss in some cup?"
Shrugging, Quentin says, "No, I came to see you. To talk."
"I got nothing to say to you."
"That's surprising," Quentin responds, "since I have sixteen years' worth."
"Then what's another day?" Gideon turns back toward the game. "I'm busy."
"I'm sorry."
The words make the boy pause. "Yeah, right," he murmurs. He storms back to the basketball court, grabbing the ball and spinning it in the air--to impress Quentin, maybe? "Let's go, let's go!" he calls, and the others rally around him. Quentin walks off. "Who was that, man?" he hears one of the boys ask Gideon. And Gideon's response, when he thinks Quentin is too far away to hear: "Some guy who needed directions."
From the window of the doctor's office at Dana-Farber, Patrick can see the ragtag edge of Boston. Olivia Bessette, the oncologist listed on Father Szyszynski's medical reports, has turned out to be considerably younger than Patrick expected--not much older than Patrick himself. She sits with her hands folded, her curly hair pulled into a sensible bun, one rubber-soled white clog tapping lightly on the floor. "Leukemia only affects the blood cells," she explains, "and chronic myeloid leukemia tends to have an onset in patients in their forties and fifties--although I've had some cases with patients in their twenties."
Patrick wonders how you sit on the edge of a hospital bed and tell someone they are not going to live. It is not that different, he imagines, from knocking on a door in the middle of the night and informing a parent that his son has been killed in a drunk driving accident. "What happens to the blood cells?" he asks.
"Blood cells are all programmed to die, just like we are. They start out at a baby stage, then grow up to be a little more functional, and by the time they get spit out of the bone marrow they are adult cells. By then, white cells should be able to fight infection on your behalf, red blood cells should be able to carry oxygen, and platelets should be able to clot your blood. But if you have leukemia, your cells never mature ... and they never die. So you wind up with a proliferation of white cells that don't work, and that overrun all your other cells."
Patrick is not really going against Nina's wishes, being here. All he's doing is clarifying what they know--not taking it a step farther. He secured this appointment on a ruse, pretending that he is working on behalf of the assistant attorney general. Mr. Brown, Patrick explained, has the burden of proof. Which means they need to be a hundred percent sure that Father Szyszynski didn't drop dead of leukemia the moment that his assailant pulled out a gun. Could Dr. Bessette, his former oncologist, offer any opinions?
"What does a bone marrow transplant do?" Patrick asks.
"Wonders, if it works. There are six proteins on all of our cells, human leukocyte antigens, or HLA. They help our bodies recognize you as you, and me as me. When you're looking for a bone marrow donor, you're hoping for all six of these proteins to match yours. In most cases, this means siblings, half-siblings, maybe a cousin--relatives seem to have the lowest instance of rejection."
"Rejection?" Patrick asks.
"Yes. In essence, you're trying to convince your body that the donor cells are actually yours, because you have the same six proteins on them. If you can't do that, your immune system will reject the bone marrow transplant, which leads to Graft Versus Host disease."
"Like a heart transplant."
"Exactly. Except this isn't an organ. Bone marrow is harvested from the pelvis, because it's the big bones in your body that make blood. Basically, we put the donor to sleep and then stick needles into his hips about 150 times on each side, suctioning out the early cells."
He winces, and the doctor smiles a little. "It is painful. Being a bone marrow donor is a very selfless thing."
Yeah, this guy was a fucking altruist, Patrick thinks.
"Meanwhile, the patient with leukemia has been taking immunosuppressants. The week before the transplant, he's given enough chemotherapy to kill all the blood cells in his body. It's timed this way, so that his bone marrow is empty."
"You can live like that?"
"You're at huge risk for infection. The patient still has his own living blood cells ... he's just not making any new ones. Then he gets the donor marrow, through a simple IV. It takes about two hours, and we don't know how, but the cells manage to find their way to the bone marrow in his own body and start growing. After about a month, his bone marrow has been entirely replaced by his donor's."
"And his blood cells would have the donor's six proteins, that HLA stuff?" Patrick asks.
"That's right."
"How about the donor's DNA?"
Dr. Bessette nods. "Yes. In all respects, his blood is really someone else's. He's just fooling his body into believing it's truly his."
Patrick leans forward. "But if it takes--if the cancer goes into remission--does the patient's body start making his own blood again?"
"No. If it did, we'd consider it a rejection of the graft, and the leukemia would return. We want the patient to keep producing his donor's blood forever." She taps the file on her desk. "In Glen Szyszynski's case, five years after the transplant, he was given a clean bill of health. His new bone marrow was working quite well, and the chance of a recurrence of leukemia was less than ten percent." Dr. Bessette nods. "I think the prosecution can safely say that however the priest died, it wasn't of leukemia."
Patrick smiles at her. "Guess it felt good to have a success story."
"It always does. Father Szyszynski was lucky to have found a perfect match."
"A perfect match?"
"That's what we call it when a donor's HLA corresponds to all six of the patient's HLA."
Patrick takes a quick breath. "Especially when they're not related."
"Oh," Dr. Bessette says. "But that wasn't the case here. Father Szyszynski and his donor were half-brothers."
Francesca Martine came to the Maine State Lab by way of New Hampshire, where she'd been working as a DNA scientist until something better came along. That something turned out not to be the ballistics expert who broke her heart. She moved north, nursing her wounds, and discovered what she'd always known--safety came in gels and Petri dishes, and numbers never hurt you.
That said, numbers also couldn't explain the visceral reaction she has the minute she first meets Quentin Brown. On the phone, she imagined him like all the other state drones--harried and underpaid, with skin a sickly shade of gray. But from the moment he walks into her lab, she cannot take her eyes off him. He is striking, certainly, with his excessive height and his mahogany complexion, but Frankie knows that isn't the attraction. She feels a pull between them, magnetism honed by the common experience of being different. She is not black, but she's often been the only woman in the room with an IQ of 220.
Unfortunately, if she wants Quentin Brown to study her closely, she'll have to assume the shape of a forensic lab report. "What was it that made you look at this twice?" Frankie asks.
He narrows his eyes. "How come you're asking?"
"Curiosity. It's pretty esote
ric stuff for the prosecution."
Quentin hesitates, as if wondering whether to confide in her. Oh, come on, Frankie thinks. Loosen up. "The defense asked to take a look at it, specifically. Immediately. And it didn't seem to merit that kind of request. I don't see how the DNA results here make a difference for us or for them."
Frankie crosses her arms. "The reason they were interested isn't because of the lab report I issued. It's because of what's in the medical files."
"I'm not following you."
"You know the way the DNA report says that the chances of randomly selecting an unrelated individual who matches this genetic material are one in six billion?"
Quentin nods.
"Well," Frankie explains, "you just found the one."
*
It costs approximately two thousand dollars of taxpayer money to exhume a body. "No," Ted Poulin says flatly. As the attorney general of Maine, and Quentin's boss, that ought to be that. But Quentin isn't going to give up without a fight, not this time.
He grips the receiver of the phone. "The DNA scientist at the state lab says we can do the test on tooth pulp."
"Quentin, it doesn't matter for the prosecution. She killed him. Period."
"She killed a guy who molested her son. I have to change him from a sexual predator into a victim, Ted, and this is the way to do it."
There is a long silence on the other end. Quentin runs his fingertips along the grain of wood on Nina Frost's desk. He does this over and over, as if he is rubbing an amulet.
"There's no family to fight it?"
"The mother gave consent already."
Ted sighs. "The publicity is going to be outrageous."
Leaning back in his chair, Quentin grins. "Let me take care of it," he offers.
Fisher storms into the district attorney's office, uncharacteristically flustered. He has been there before, of course, but who knows where the hell they've ensconced Quentin Brown while he's prosecuting Nina's case. He has just opened up his mouth to ask the secretary when Brown himself walks out of the small kitchen area, carrying a cup of coffee. "Mr. Carrington," he says pleasantly. "Looking for me?"
Fisher withdraws the paperwork he's received that morning from his breast pocket. The Motion to Exhume. "What is this?"
Quentin shrugs. "You must know. You're the one who asked for the DNA records to be rushed over, after all."
Fisher has no idea why, in fact. The DNA records were rushed over at Nina's behest, but he'll be damned if he lets Brown know this. "What are you trying to do, counselor?"
"A simple test that proves the priest your client killed wasn't the same guy who abused her kid."
Fisher steels his gaze. "I'll see you in court tomorrow morning," he says, and by the time he gets into his car to drive to Nina's home, he has begun to understand how an ordinary human might become frustrated enough to kill.
"Fisher!" I say, and I'm actually delighted to see the man. This amazes me--either I have truly bedded down with the Enemy, or I've been under house arrest too long. I throw open the door to let him in, and realize that he is furious. "You knew," he says, his voice calm and that much more frightening for all its control. He hands me a motion filed by the assistant attorney general.
My insides begin to quiver; I feel absolutely sick. With tremendous effort I swallow and meet Fisher's eye--better to come clean eventually, than to not come clean at all. "I didn't know if I should tell you. I didn't know if the information was going to be important to my case."
"That's my job!" Fisher explodes. "You are paying me for a reason, Nina, and it's because you know on some level, although apparently not a conscious one, that I am qualified to get you acquitted. In fact, I'm more qualified to do that than any other attorney in Maine ... including you."
I look away. At heart, I am a prosecutor, and prosecutors don't tell defense attorneys everything. They dance around each other, but the prosecutor is always the one who leads, leaving the other lawyer to find his footing.
Always.
"I don't trust you," I say finally.
Fisher fields this like a blow. "Well, then. We're even."
We stare at each other, two great dogs with their teeth bared. Fisher turns away, angry, and in that moment I see my face in the reflection of the window. The truth is, I'm not a prosecutor anymore. I'm not capable of defending myself. I'm not sure I even want to.
"Fisher," I call out when he is halfway out the door. "How badly will this hurt me?"
"I don't know, Nina. It doesn't make you look any less crazy, but it's also going to strip you of public sympathy. You're not a hero anymore, killing a pedophile. You're a hothead who knocked off an innocent man--a priest, no less." He shakes his head. "You're the prime example of why we have laws in the first place."
In his eyes, I see what's coming--the fact that I am no longer a mother doing what she had to for her child, but simply a reckless woman who thought she knew better than anyone else. I wonder if camera flashes feel different on your skin when they capture you as a criminal, instead of a victim. I wonder if parents who once fathomed my actions--even if they disagreed with them--will look at me now and cross the street, just in case faulty judgment is contagious.
Fisher exhales heavily. "I can't keep them from exhuming the body."
"I know."
"And if you keep hiding information from me, it will hurt you, because I won't know how to work with it."
I duck my head. "I understand."
He raises his hand in farewell. I stand on the porch and watch him go, hugging myself against the wind. When his car heads down the street, its exhaust freezes, a sigh caught in the cold. With a deep breath I turn to find Caleb standing not three feet behind me. "Nina," he says, "what was that?"
Pushing past him, I shake my head, but he grabs my arm and will not let me go. "You lied to me. Lied to me!"
"Caleb, you don't understand--"
He grasps my shoulders and shakes me once, hard. "What is it I don't understand? That you killed an innocent man? Jesus, Nina, when is it going to hit you?"
Once, Nathaniel asked me how the snow disappears. It is like that in Maine--instead of melting over time, it takes one warm day for drifts that are thigh-high in the morning to evaporate by the time the sun goes down. Together we went to the library to learn the answer--sublimation, the process by which something solid vanishes into thin air.
With Caleb's hands holding me up, I fall apart. I let out everything I have been afraid to set free for the past week. Father Szyszynski's voice fills my head; his face swims in front of me. "I know," I sob. "Oh, Caleb, I know. I thought I could do this. I thought I could take care of it. But I made a mistake." I fold myself into the wall of his chest, waiting for his arms to come around me.
They don't.
Caleb takes a step back, shoves his hands in his pockets. His eyes are red-rimmed, haunted. "What's the mistake, Nina? That you killed a man?" he asks hoarsely. "Or that you didn't?"
"It's a shame, is what it is," the church secretary says. Myra Lester shakes her head, then hands Patrick the cup of tea she's made him. "Christmas Mass just around the corner, and us without a chaplain."
Patrick knows that the best road to information is not always the one that's paved and straightforward, but the one that cuts around back and is most often forgotten as an access route. He also knows, from his long-lapsed days of growing up Catholic, that the collective memory--and gossip mill--most often is the church secretary. So he offers his most concerned expression, the one that always got him a pinch on the cheek from his elderly aunts. "The congregation must be devastated."
"Between the rumors flying around about Father Szyszynski, and the way he was killed--well, it's most un-Christian, that's all I have to say about it." She sniffs, then settles her considerable bottom on a wing chair in the rectory office.
He would like to have assumed a different persona, now--a newcomer to Biddeford, for example, checking out the parish--but he has already been seen in his capacity
as a detective, during the sexual abuse investigation. "Myra," Patrick says, then looks up at her and smiles. "I'm sorry. I meant Mrs. Lester, of course."
Her cheeks flame, and she titters. "Oh, no, you feel free to call me whatever you like, Detective."
"Well, Myra, I've been trying to get in touch with the priests that were visiting St. Anne's shortly before Father Szyszynski's death."
"Oh, yes, they were lovely. Just lovely! That Father O'Toole, he had the most scrumptious Southern accent. Like peach schnapps, that's what I thought of every time he spoke .... Or was that Father Gwynne?"
"The prosecution's hounding me. I don't suppose you'd have any idea where I could find them?"
"They've gone back to their own congregations, of course."
"Is there a record of that? A forwarding address, maybe?"
Myra frowns, and a small pattern of lines in the shape of a spider appears on her forehead. "I'm sure there must be. Nothing in this church goes on without me knowing the details." She walks toward all the ledgers and logs stacked behind her desk. Flipping through the pages of a leather-bound book, she finds an entry and smacks it with the flat of her hand. "It's right here. Fathers Brendan O'Toole, from St. Dennis's, in Harwich, Massachusetts, and Arthur Gwynne, due to depart this afternoon as per the See of Portland." Myra scratches her hair with the eraser of a pencil. "I suppose the other priest could have come from Harwich, too, but that wouldn't explain the peach schnapps."
"Maybe he moved as a child," Patrick suggests. "What's the Sea of Portland?"
"See, S-E-E. It's the governing diocese hereabouts in Maine, of course." She lifts her face to Patrick's. "They're the ones who sent the priests to us in the first place."
Midnight, in a graveyard, with an unearthed casket--Patrick can think of a thousand places he'd rather be. But he stands beside the two sweating men who have hauled the coffin from the ground and set it beside Father Szyszynski's resting place, like an altar in the moonlight. He has promised to be Nina's eyes, Nina's legs. And if necessary, Nina's hands.