She Was at Risk

by P. D. Workman

  “That’s wonderful to hear. You know how we feel about Kenzie. I think the two of you are a great match.”

  “Yeah. Things are working out well right now. I hope… they’ll continue that way…” Zachary was anxious about putting these thoughts into words. He was always afraid that saying something aloud about his relationship would somehow jinx it. He didn’t want to take any chances on messing up anything about his relationship with Kenzie.

  The knot in his stomach reminded him that he had already taken a rather large step that he knew could cause a rift between him and Kenzie. She would not be at all happy to hear that he had taken a job from Gordon. Even less so when she discovered it involved him surveilling Bridget.

  “Zachary?”

  “Oh, what? Sorry, I was just…” he trailed off and left space for Mr. Peterson to just pick the conversation back up again, not wanting to explain or give an excuse.

  “It’s fine. I’m wondering about next weekend. If you would be able to come for a visit.”

  “Uh, sure, I think so. Let me just look at the calendar for a minute.” Zachary picked up his phone and switched over to the calendar app. “Yeah, that looks fine.”

  “And how about Kenzie? Could she come too, or is she working on the weekend?”

  “Might be working. I’ll have to ask her.”

  Though he had given Kenzie the information she needed to add his calendar to her phone, she hadn’t given him hers. That didn’t particularly bother Zachary. She might have confidential stuff on her calendar to do with her job. Or they might not allow her to share her calendar with people outside the medical examiner’s office as a matter of policy. He hadn’t asked. He didn’t need someone else’s information on his phone; it would only distract him from his own. If he didn’t keep his calendar simple and clean, his dyslexia made it impossible to read and comprehend it.

  “Well, if she can come, she is invited as well.”

  “Can they come?” Zachary heard Pat’s voice in the background and thought he detected a note of excitement.

  “What’s going on?”

  It had been at Mr. Peterson’s house that he’d met Joss, his older sister, a reunion set up by Tyrrell and Heather, the two siblings he’d already met. And he still hadn’t met the youngest two siblings, so he wondered whether they were trying to set up yet another reunion. He wasn’t opposed to it, but wasn’t sure he liked them doing it behind his back. They didn’t want him to feel anxious about it ahead of time, but he preferred to have some time to mentally prepare.

  “Pat’s mother and sister are going to be over,” Mr. Peterson explained. “He’d like you to meet them. We talked about that before… Christmas time…?”

  Zachary remembered. Pat’s father had died the previous year, and he had finally been able to reconcile with his mother and sister, after being shunned by the family for many years for being gay.

  “Yeah. Of course. I remember.”

  “She wants to meet her grandson,” Pat called out.

  Zachary chuckled. He’d never had a grandparent that he could remember. He didn’t know if his parents had been estranged from their own families, or if they were orphans, but he didn’t know any blood relations other than his siblings in his biological family. And while Pat had never been one of Zachary’s foster fathers, he and Mr. Peterson had both been the only ones in a parental role since Zachary had aged out of care.

  “I would be glad to meet them.”

  “He’s up for it,” Mr. Peterson relayed to Pat.

  “Perfect! I’m going to make ravioli. No one in my family was ever a cook. They haven’t had anything but the canned stuff.”

  “They’ll love it,” Zachary told Lorne. “Is he making the cheese ones?”

  “Is that a request?”

  “If he feels like it.” Zachary wasn’t about to insist. He wouldn’t be eating much, and Pat should make something that his family would enjoy, not cater to Zachary.

  “Zachary wants the cheese ones,” Mr. Peterson reported to his partner.

  Zachary laughed and didn’t try to correct him. There wasn’t any point.

  Bridget picked that moment to leave the store with her cart of groceries.

  Or rather, one of the grocery store staff was pushing Bridget’s cart of groceries.

  Zachary studied the store clerk as he and Bridget walked across the parking lot to Bridget’s yellow Volkswagen bug. He reached for a camera with a telephoto lens and carefully focused on the man pushing Bridget’s cart.

  Did he think the man was the father of Bridget’s babies? Zachary mentally shook his head at the thought. He did not. But his full report would need to include pictures of anyone he saw Bridget with, especially if it were out of the ordinary.

  Bridget walked slowly, and halfway to the car she stopped to rest, pressing her hand against the small of her back. The man pushing the cart stopped and waited, chatting with her. They moved on again, and Bridget climbed awkwardly into the car as the man unloaded the groceries into her car.

  Just someone helping her with the physical chore of getting her groceries from one place to the other when she was already carrying a heavy load.

  Zachary snapped several pictures, then put the camera back to the side.

  “Sorry,” he said, realizing that Lorne was still on the line and was probably wondering what was going on. “Needed to get a couple of pictures. I’m sort of on surveillance.”

  “You told me you could talk,” Mr. Peterson reproached. “I don’t want to keep you if you’re on the job.”

  “It’s fine. She was in the store, so I was just waiting.”

  “But she’s out now, so I’ll let you go. I’ll email you.”

  “Okay. But it’s a yes to dinner. I’ll make it work, whether Kenzie comes or not.”

  “Excellent. Pat is eager for them to meet you.”

  14

  Zachary waited until after supper to bring up his questions, giving Kenzie all of his attention while they ate. She seemed to have had a better day at work, whether that was because she hadn’t had to work any more on the teenager who had died of kidney failure or because she had opened up to talk to Zachary about it. He was glad that she seemed to be less stressed about it.

  “I’ll be reporting to my client on the surveillance so far,” he told Kenzie as they cleared the dishes, uncertain whether it would lead into what he wanted to discuss or not.

  “Yeah? How has it been going? Is she having an affair?”

  “I don’t think so. Haven’t seen any sign of it.”

  “She could have had one a few months back and ended it since,” Kenzie suggested.

  “Yeah, it’s possible. I’ll see whether I can find anything out, but I don’t know if there is anything there.”

  “Which means you’re back to whether it was a problem at the fertility clinic she had her procedure done by.”

  “Yeah. Spent some time there this afternoon checking out security procedures.”

  Kenzie motioned to the couch, and she and Zachary sat down. “What was it like? I haven’t ever been to a fertility clinic.”

  “Nice place. Dark wood and artwork in the waiting room. Looks more like a lawyer’s office than a doctor’s. Except for the pictures of babies on the walls, of course.”

  “So that’s the outside. That doesn’t really tell you what the inside is like.”

  “No. Good staff. Prepared to answer questions and do an orientation.”

  “And...?”

  “The fellow who gave me a tour… he looked like a doctor, but he didn’t introduce himself as one. Just first and last name. When was the last time you heard a doctor do that?”

  “Not likely,” Kenzie said, shaking her head immediately. “Doctors expect to be addressed as ‘doctor’ even if they aren’t practicing anymore. It’s a big deal. You don’t ‘mister’ them. And even if one introduced himself to me with his first name, I would probably still call him doctor. It’s just one of those things.”

  “Yeah.
So he must not have been a doctor, right?”

  Kenzie considered for a few moments. “Probably not. I don’t always introduce myself as a doctor, because I’m not meeting them in that capacity. But at a clinic like that… even if they’re trying to make people feel relaxed and at home… people will be more reassured by someone with the title of doctor, even if he says ‘Call me Paul’ or whatever after introducing himself. If I was getting an orientation—as a patient? Did you say you were a patient?”

  “Yes. That my wife and I were trying to get pregnant and had been referred there by our specialist.”

  “If I was getting an orientation for the fertility clinic, I would want to know that I was in good hands, that the doctor was there to help me and I wasn’t just going to be pawned off on the receptionist or a nurse.”

  “So you agree. He probably was not a doctor.”

  “No. I wouldn’t think so. If he was, he would have told you. So what was he?”

  “I’m not sure. He didn’t give me a title, just his name. He was dressed like a doctor.”

  “Scrubs?”

  “No. A white jacket over dress shirt and slacks. You don’t see lab workers or nurses dressed like that, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t expect to.”

  Zachary rubbed his jaw, thinking about the day and everything he had learned at the clinic.

  “What was it like?” Kenzie asked. “Do you think it could have been an innocent mistake?”

  “They have pretty strict procedures. For the routine stuff. So no… I don’t think it was an accidental switch.”

  “What does that mean, for the routine stuff?”

  “Collecting samples, doing implantations, or whatever it is called. They have procedures for all of that stuff, lots of checking ID Numbers on the tubes.”

  “Okay, but…?”

  “But I couldn’t see any controls to prevent people from sabotaging samples. Contaminating them, replacing them, that kind of thing. They have a checkout log, but just a paper sign-out sheet. Nothing that tracks it electronically, no person who administers it. Not like the evidence room at the police station, where someone makes sure you are authorized to take out a sample and keeps track of everyone who has touched it.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t expect them to have anything as stringent as the police department. But… I see your point. Preventing intentional sabotage would be different from preventing accidental mix-ups or cross-contamination. But someone like we talked about, a doctor with a god complex, he’s not doing it by accident. It doesn’t matter what ID Number is on the collection vial.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought too. And the security controls to make sure that no one other than the medical staff can access the specimens are pretty lax. A locked door that pretty much any petty burglar or someone watching online videos could get past. It’s not secure. They may say that they haven’t had any burglaries or any mix-ups in all of the time that they’ve been in operation, but I can’t just take their word for that.”

  “If there was a burglary, you can at least check that with the police department. They should be able to tell you whether that part is true or not.”

  “Yeah. But we’re not actually interested in whether anyone has stolen anything, but whether they have swapped, replaced, or contaminated anything. And that could be done by someone inside or outside the clinic.”

  “What are you going to do? Will your clients do DNA testing for paternity and maternity?”

  Zachary shrugged. “I think he will. The wife… I don’t know.”

  “If she’s not having an affair, then what is the downside? She finds out whether the baby is hers or not. And her husband’s or not. Wouldn’t she rather know before making the decision to terminate or not?”

  “I’m not sure. She didn’t want to do the Huntington’s test. I mean, she did DNA testing for the baby, but not herself. The husband went and did his own. But she didn’t want to know. She said it wasn’t from her because it wasn’t in her family. Would she want to find out for sure that the baby isn’t hers?” Zachary shook his head slowly. “I don’t think she does. But I don’t know. Emotions…”

  “Emotions aren’t logic,” Kenzie agreed. “Just because something seems logical to us, that doesn’t mean someone would accept our recommendation. There are all kinds of other factors involved. Past experiences, fears, worries about the relationship, how it might affect the child’s life. A lot of sticky emotional issues get involved.”

  Zachary nodded. If it were him, he didn’t think he would want to know. He would want to have the child, to raise it as his own whether she were biologically related to him or not.

  But he wasn’t like Bridget. Gordon said she had been talking about terminating before she even knew the results of the DNA test. That sounded more like the Bridget he knew. Regretting the decision to get pregnant and looking for a way out. He didn’t know how Gordon had talked her into it in the first place.

  It would make sense to him that Bridget would want to have the babies’ parentage tested, even if she hadn’t wanted her own DNA tested for Huntington’s Disease. Maybe Gordon could gently talk her into it.

  If the babies weren’t his, then he would concede to Bridget terminating the pregnancy and try a second time.

  15

  Zachary had been putting off reporting to Gordon. When he reported back that Bridget was probably not having an affair and that his best guess was someone at Westlake was intentionally mixing or swapping samples, that would be the end of his retainer. Zachary would no longer be able to justify following Bridget around and watching her every movement.

  Maybe Gordon would want him to make further inquiries about the possibility that she’d been having an affair when the babies were conceived. He could talk to some of her friends and find out whether she was seeing anyone other than Gordon. Or could he? How many of them would know about him? Or would report back to Bridget about the man asking all of the questions. Bridget would immediately recognize the strange man as being Zachary, and he would be outed.

  He could involve a subcontractor. Maybe Heather. She hadn’t done anything like that in the past, but he had been training her in private detective skills, and perhaps it was time to take it to the next level. She was brilliant on the computer. She had taken immediately to skip-tracing. How would she do on the ground, talking to people face-to-face? Could she find a way to talk to Bridget’s girlfriends naturally? So that it seemed to be part of a normal conversation?

  Zachary sighed. He had to know that the retainer was going to come to an end sooner or later. And it would probably be sooner. There wasn’t any evidence that Bridget was having an affair. It was far more likely she had become pregnant with the implanted embryos than naturally. Not after the cancer treatments. Not coincidentally in the same month that the embryos were implanted. That was just too much of a stretch. He understood that was where Gordon’s imagination had immediately taken him, but the truth was probably something much less intimate.

  His phone rang. Zachary knew without looking at it that it was going to be Gordon. He swiped the call after verifying that it was, in fact, his latest client.

  “Gordon, I was just thinking about you.”

  “I was expecting a report before this,” Gordon reproached.

  “Yeah… sorry about that. I was just gathering my thoughts so I could give you a call.”

  “Gathering your thoughts… that sounds serious. Does that mean that you found something?”

  “Well, I made some progress, but I don’t have a definite answer for you.”

  Gordon sighed. “So, you don’t know if she is having an affair?”

  “Now? I would say not. Nothing in her behavior or daily patterns would indicate that. She’s doing the same things that she always did, going where she used to go. Nowhere new, no changes in her routines, other than not getting out until later in the day. Obviously she is still not feeling very well in the morning.”

  “No,” Gordon confirmed. “Not as
bad as it was in the beginning, but she’s still not herself. Pain and nausea. Mood swings. Irritability.”

  Zachary didn’t tell Gordon that maybe that wasn’t because of morning sickness. Bridget’s emotional behavior wasn’t likely to stop when she was no longer pregnant. Not if Zachary’s life with her was any indication.

  “So I don’t think she’s having an affair. I could watch for a few days, just in case it isn’t someone she sees very often. And I could dig into her background, her behavior around the time that the twins were conceived.”

  “No… I think you’re probably right. What are the chances that she would become pregnant the same month as we had the embryos implanted?” Gordon didn’t know he was echoing exactly what Zachary had been reasoning to himself before Gordon had called.

  “Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking. And that takes us to the next possibility. That the wrong eggs or sperm were used in Bridget’s IVF procedure.”

  “I hate to think that could be true. I mean, you hear stories, but it can’t be very common, can it? That kind of thing must be so rare…”

  “It is rare. But not impossible.”

  Gordon swore flatly. “Have you looked into the clinic? Have there been any other cases where this has happened?”

  “I’ve ordered a courthouse search to see if they’ve been sued for it in the past. And I’m going to check with the police department to see whether they have had any break-ins or other security breaches there the last little while. But that’s a long shot. What are the chances someone broke in to swap samples around or substitute their own genetic material for what was banked? I think that would stretch the bounds of credulity.”

  “Yes. I’ve never heard of that happening before. Embryos being stolen, but not… switched.”

  “Right. What we usually hear about in the media is mix-ups being made by the clinic. Wrong genetic material being used. I had a tour of the clinic and talked with people there, and their controls for making sure that they are using the right specimens for each procedure are reasonable. Did they talk to the two of you about always verifying the identification numbers on the collection vials? About always making sure that everything in every procedure is listed with your file number?”