Chromosome 6

by Robin Cook

  From Columbus Circle, Jack shot across Fifty-ninth Street to Park Avenue. At that time of the evening, Park Avenue was a dream, and he took it all the way to Laurie’s street. He secured his bike with his collection of locks and went to Laurie’s door. Before ringing her bell, he took a moment to compose himself, determining how best to act and what to say.

  Laurie met him at the door, with a wide grin on her face. Before he could even say a word, she threw her free arm around his neck to give him a hug. In her other hand, she was balancing a glass of wine.

  “Uh-oh,” she said, stepping back. She eyed the wild state of his close-cropped hair. “I forgot about the bike issue. Don’t tell me you rode down here.”

  Jack shrugged guiltily.

  “Well, at least you made it,” Laurie said. She unzipped his leather jacket and peeled it off his back.

  Jack could see Lou sitting on the sofa, with a grin that rivaled the Cheshire cat’s.

  Laurie took Jack’s arm and pulled him into the living room. “Do you want the surprise first or do you want to eat first?” she asked.

  “Let’s have the surprise,” Jack said.

  “Good,” Lou said. He bounded off the couch and went to the TV.

  Laurie guided Jack to the spot Lou had just vacated. “Do you want a glass of wine?”

  Jack nodded. He was confused. He hadn’t seen any ring, and Lou was intently studying the VCR remote. Laurie disappeared into the kitchen but was soon back with Jack’s wine.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” Lou complained. “At home, my daughter runs the VCR.”

  Laurie took the remote, then told Lou that he had to turn on the TV first.

  Jack took a sip of the wine. It wasn’t much better than what he’d brought the previous night.

  Laurie and Lou joined Jack on the couch. Jack looked from one to the other, but they were ignoring him. They were intently watching the TV screen.

  “What’s this surprise?” Jack asked.

  “Just watch,” Laurie said, pointing toward the electronic snow on the TV.

  More confused than ever, Jack looked at the screen. All of a sudden, there was music and the CNN logo followed by the image of a moderately obese man coming out of a Manhattan restaurant Jack recognized as Positano. The man was surrounded by a group of people.

  “Should I put on the sound?” Laurie asked.

  “Nah, it’s not necessary,” Lou said.

  Jack watched the sequence. When it was over he looked at Laurie and Lou. Both had huge smiles.

  “What is going on here?” Jack questioned. “How much wine have you two been drinking?”

  “Do you recognize what you’ve just seen?” Laurie asked.

  “I’d say it was somebody getting shot,” Jack said.

  “It’s Carlo Franconi,” Laurie said. “After watching it, does it remind you of anything?”

  “Sort of reminds me of those old tapes of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot,” Jack said.

  “Show it to him again,” Lou suggested.

  Jack watched the sequence for the second time. He divided his attention between the screen and watching Laurie and Lou. They were captivated.

  After the second run-through, Laurie again turned to Jack and said: “Well?”

  Jack shrugged. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “Let me run certain sections in slow motion,” Laurie said. She used the remote to isolate the sequence to where Franconi was about to climb into the limo. She ran it in slow motion, and then stopped it exactly at the moment he was shot. She walked up to the screen and pointed at the base of the man’s neck. “There’s the entry point,” she said.

  Using the remote again, she advanced to the moment of the next impact when the victim was falling to his right.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” Jack remarked with astonishment. “My floater might be Carlo Franconi!”

  Laurie spun around from facing the TV. Her eyes were blazing. “Exactly!” she said triumphantly. “Obviously, we haven’t proved it yet but with the entrance wounds and the paths of the bullets in the floater, I’d be willing to bet five dollars.”

  “Whoa!” Jack commented. “I’ll take you up on a five-dollar wager, but I want to remind you that’s a hundred percent higher than any bet you’ve ever made in my presence.”

  “I’m that sure,” Laurie said.

  “Laurie is so fast at making associations,” said Lou. “She picked up on the similarities right away. She always makes me feel stupid.”

  “Get out of here!” Laurie said, giving Lou a friendly shove.

  “Is this the surprise you guys wanted to tell me about?” Jack asked cautiously. He didn’t want to get his hopes up.

  “Yes,” Laurie said. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you as excited as we are?”

  Jack laughed with relief. “Oh, I’m just tickled pink!”

  “I can never tell when you are serious,” Laurie said. She detected a certain amount of Jack’s typical sarcasm in his reply.

  “It’s the best news I’ve heard in days,” Jack added. “Maybe weeks.”

  “All right, let’s not overdo it,” Laurie said. She turned off the TV and the VCR. “Enough of the surprise, let’s eat.”

  Over dinner the conversation turned to why no one even considered that the floater might be Franconi.

  “For me it was the shotgun wound,” Laurie said. “Which I knew Franconi didn’t have. Also I was thrown off by the body’s being found way out off Coney Island. Now, if it had been fished out of the East River, it might have been a different story.”

  “I suppose I was thrown off for the same reasons,” Jack said. “And then, when I realized the shotgun wound was postmortem, I was already engrossed in the issue about the liver. By the way, Lou, did Franconi have a liver transplant?”

  “Not that I know of,” Lou said. “He’d been sick for a number of years, but I never knew the diagnosis. I hadn’t heard anything about a liver transplant.”

  “If he didn’t have a liver transplant, then the floater isn’t Franconi,” Jack said. “Even though the DNA lab is having a hard time confirming it, I’m personally convinced the floater has a donated liver.”

  “What else can you people do to confirm that the floater and Franconi are the same person?” Lou asked.

  “We can request a blood sample from the mother,” Laurie said. “Comparing the mitochondrial DNA which all of us inherit only from our mothers, we could tell right away if the floater is Franconi. I’m sure the mother will be agreeable, since she’d been the one to come to identify the body initially.”

  “Too bad an X ray wasn’t taken when Franconi came in,” Jack said. “That would have done it.”

  “But there was an X ray!” Laurie said with excitement. “I just found out this evening. Marvin had taken one.”

  “Where the hell did it go?” Jack asked.

  “Marvin said that Bingham took it,” Laurie said. “It must be in his office.”

  “Then I suggest we make a little foray to the morgue,” Jack said. “I’d like to settle this issue.”

  “Bingham’s office will be locked,” Laurie said.

  “I think this situation calls for some creative action,” Jack said.

  “Amen,” Lou said. “This might be that break I’ve been hoping for.”

  As soon as they had finished eating and cleaning up the kitchen, which Jack and Lou had insisted on doing, the three took a cab down to the morgue. They entered through the receiving dock and went directly into the mortuary office.

  “My God!” Marvin commented when he saw both Jack and Laurie. It was rare for two medical examiners to show up at the same time during the evening. “Has there been a natural disaster?”

  “Where are the janitors?” Jack asked.

  “In the pit last time I looked,” Marvin said. “Seriously, what’s up?”

  “An identity crisis,” Jack quipped.

  Jack led the others to the autopsy room and cracked the door. Marvin had b
een right. Both janitors were busy mopping the expansive terrazzo floor.

  “I assume you guys have keys to the chief’s office,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Daryl Foster said. Daryl had been working for the medical examiner’s office for almost thirty years. His partner, Jim O’Donnel, was a relatively new employee.

  “We’ve got to get in there,” Jack said. “Would you mind opening it?”

  Daryl hesitated. “The chief’s kind’a sensitive about people being in his office,” he said.

  “I’ll take responsibility,” Jack said. “This is an emergency. Besides we have Lieutenant Detective Soldano with us from the police department, who will keep our thievery to a minimum.”

  “I don’t know,” Daryl said. He was obviously uncomfortable, as well as unimpressed, with Jack’s humor.

  “Then give me the key,” Jack said. He stuck out his hand. “That way you won’t be involved.”

  With obvious reluctance, Daryl removed two keys from his key chain and handed them to Jack. “One’s for the outer office, and one is for Dr. Bingham’s inner office.”

  “I’ll have them back for you in five minutes,” Jack said.

  Daryl didn’t respond.

  “I think the poor guy was intimidated,” Lou commented as the three rose up to the first floor in the elevator.

  “Once Jack is on a mission, look out!” Laurie said.

  “Bureaucracy irks me,” Jack said. “There’s no excuse for the X ray to be squirreled away in the chief’s office in the first place.”

  Jack opened the front office’s outer door and then Dr. Bingham’s inner door. He turned on the lights.

  The office was large, with a big desk beneath high windows to the left and a large library table to the right. Teaching paraphernalia, including a blackboard and an X-ray view box, were at the head of the table.

  “Where should we look?” Laurie asked.

  “I was hoping they’d just be on that view box,” Jack said. “But I don’t see them. I tell you what, I’ll take the desk and the file cabinet, you look around the view box.”

  “Fine,” Laurie said.

  “What do you want me to do?” Lou asked.

  “You just stand there and make sure we don’t steal anything,” Jack scoffed.

  Jack pulled out several of the file drawers, but closed them quickly. The full-body X rays that were taken by the morgue came in large folders. It wasn’t something easily hidden.

  “This looks promising,” Laurie called out. She’d found a stash of X rays in the cabinet directly under the view box. Lifting the folders out onto the library table, she scanned the names. She found Franconi’s and pulled them free of the others.

  Returning to the basement level, Jack got the X rays of the floater and took both folders back to the autopsy room. He gave Bingham’s office keys to Daryl and thanked him. Daryl merely nodded.

  “Okay, everybody!” Jack said, walking over to the view box. “The critical moment has arrived.” First he slipped up Franconi’s X rays and then the headless floater’s.

  “What do you know,” Jack said after only a second’s inspection. “I owe Laurie five dollars!”

  Laurie gave a cry of triumph, as Jack gave her the money. Lou scratched his head and leaned closer to the light box to stare at the films. “How can you guys tell so quickly?” he asked.

  Jack pointed out the lumpy shadows of the bullets almost obscured by the mass of shotgun pellets in the floater’s X rays and showed how they corresponded to the bullets on the Franconi films. Then he pointed to identical healed clavicular fractures that appeared on the X rays of the two bodies.

  “This is great,” Lou said, rubbing his hands together with enthusiasm that almost matched Laurie’s. “Now that we have a corpus delicti, we might be able to make some headway in this case.”

  “And I’ll be able to figure out what the hell’s going on concerning this guy’s liver,” Jack said.

  “And maybe I’ll go on a shopping spree with my money,” Laurie said, giving the five-dollar bill a kiss. “But not until I figure out the how and the why this body left here in the first place.”

  Unable to sleep despite having taken two sleeping pills, Raymond slipped out of bed so as not to disturb Darlene. Not that he was terribly worried. Darlene was such a sound sleeper that the ceiling could fall in without her so much as moving.

  Raymond padded into the kitchen and turned on the light. He wasn’t hungry but he thought that perhaps a little warm milk might help to settle his roiling stomach. Ever since the shock of having been forced to view the terrible sight in the trunk of the Ford, he’d been suffering with heartburn. He’d tried Maalox, Pepcid AC, and finally Pepto-Bismol. Nothing had helped.

  Raymond was not handy in the kitchen, mainly because he didn’t know where anything was located. Consequently, it took him some time to heat the milk and find an appropriate glass. When it was ready, he carried it into his study and sat at his desk.

  After taking a few sips, he noticed that it was three-fifteen in the morning. Despite the fuzziness in his brain from the sleeping pills, he was able to figure out that at the Zone it was after nine, a good time to call Siegfried Spallek.

  The connection was almost instantaneous. At that hour, phone traffic with North America was at a minimum. Aurielo answered promptly and put Raymond through to the director.

  “You are up early,” Siegfried commented. “I was going to call you in four or five hours.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Raymond said. “What’s going on over there? What’s the problem with Kevin Marshall?”

  “I believe the problem is over,” Siegfried said. Siegfried summarized what had happened and gave credit to Bertram Edwards for alerting him about Kevin so that he could be followed. He said that Kevin and his friends had been given such a scare that they wouldn’t dare go near the island again.

  “What do you mean ‘friends’?” Raymond asked. “Kevin has always been such a loner.”

  “He was with the reproductive technologist and one of the surgical nurses,” Siegfried said. “Frankly, even that surprised us since he’s always been such a schlemiel, or what do you Americans call such a socially inept person?”

  “A nerd,” Raymond said.

  “That’s it,” Siegfried said.

  “And presumably the stimulus for this attempted visit to the island was the smoke that’s been bothering him?”

  “That’s what Bertram Edwards says,” Siegfried said. “And Bertram had a good idea. We’re going to tell Kevin that we’ve had a work crew out there building a bridge over the stream that divides the island in two.”

  “But you haven’t,” Raymond said.

  “Of course not,” Siegfried said. “The last work crew we had out there was when we built the landing for the extension bridge to the mainland. Of course, Bertram had some people there when he moved those hundred cages out there.”

  “I don’t know anything about cages on the island,” Raymond said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Bertram has been lobbying lately to give up on the island isolation idea,” Siegfried said. “He thinks that the bonobos should be brought to the animal center and somehow hidden.”

  “I want them to stay on the island,” Raymond said emphatically. “That was the agreement I worked out with GenSys. They could shut the program down if we bring the animals in. They’re paranoid about publicity.”

  “I know,” Siegfried said. “That’s exactly what I told Bertram. He understands but wants to leave the cages there just in case. I don’t see any harm in that. In fact, it is good to be prepared for unexpected contingencies.”

  Raymond ran a nervous hand through his hair. He didn’t want to hear about any “unexpected contingencies.”

  “I was going to ask you how you wanted us to handle Kevin and the women,” Siegfried said. “But with this explanation about the smoke and having given them a good scare, I think the situation is under control.”

  “They didn�
��t get onto the island, did they?” Raymond asked.

  “No, they were only at the staging area,” Siegfried said.

  “I don’t even like people nosing around there,” Raymond said.

  “I understand,” Siegfried said. “I don’t think Kevin will go back for the reasons I’ve given. But just to be on the safe side, I’m leaving a Moroccan guard and a contingent of the Equatoguinean soldiers out there for a few days, provided you think it’s a good idea.”

  “That’s fine,” Raymond said. “But tell me, what’s your feeling about smoke coming out of the island, assuming that Kevin is right about it?”

  “Me?” Siegfried questioned. “I couldn’t care less what those animals do out there. As long as they stay there and stay healthy. Does it bother you?”

  “Not in the slightest,” Raymond said.

  “Maybe we should send over a bunch of soccer balls,” Siegfried said. “That might keep them entertained.” He laughed heartily.

  “I hardly think this is a laughing matter,” Raymond said irritably. Raymond was not fond of Siegfried, although he appreciated his disciplined managerial style. Raymond could picture the director at his desk, surrounded by his stuffed menagerie and those skulls dotting his desk.

  “When are you coming for the patient?” Siegfried asked. “I’ve been told he’s doing fantastically well and ready to go.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Raymond said. “I put in a call to Cambridge, and as soon as the GenSys plane is available, I’ll be over. It should be in a day or so.”

  “Let me know,” Siegfried said. “I’ll have a car waiting for you in Bata.”

  Raymond replaced the receiver and breathed a small sigh of relief. He was glad he’d called Africa, since part of his current anxiety had stemmed from Siegfried’s disturbing message about there being a problem with Kevin. It was good to know the crisis had been taken care of. In fact, Raymond thought that if he could just get the image of that snapshot of him hovering over Cindy Carlson’s body out of his mind, he’d feel almost like himself again.