She Was at Risk

by P. D. Workman

  “Sure. I could even tell you what our number was. But that assumes that they don’t make any mistakes in the lab. Unlike during the natural process, we are not present for the fertilization or monitoring of the embryos for the first few days.”

  “Right. And I talked to them about that. They always have two people verify that the right specimens are being used. Or so they say. They do have internal controls for that.”

  “So there isn’t any chance of an accidental mix-up. That’s what you’re telling me, right?”

  “I wouldn’t say no chance, but I think the chances are pretty small. It could happen if someone is sloppy and doesn’t follow the proper procedures. But I’m more concerned about the possibility of something happening… on purpose.”

  “Something goes wrong in the fertilization process, you mean? They use all of the right material, but something is… damaged? I understand that genetic mistakes are more common with fertility technology. The chances of mutations increase every time you touch the genetic materials.”

  Zachary hadn’t looked into that, but it made sense. Mess with Mother Nature, and she would get even with you.

  “Maybe… but that’s not what I meant. What I mean is, they don’t have controls to prevent someone from intentionally contaminating or replacing the samples.”

  “Intentionally? But who would do that? Do you think I have an enemy who would do that? At the fertility clinic?” His voice dripped with disbelief.

  “No. I mean one of the doctors or staff… they sometimes decide to use their own sperm. It’s happened a few times. Big lawsuits. Who knows how often it happens without the doctor getting caught.”

  “Really?” Gordon considered this. “But why would someone risk that? I can understand if there was something to be gained, or they wanted to get back at a rival. But just for the heck of it? People that they’d never even met before? Why would anyone do that?”

  “Apparently, some doctors have a god complex. They have huge egos and think that the world would be better populated with their progeny.”

  “Really? Good grief.”

  Zachary nodded and waited. There wasn’t really anything else for him to investigate. The case was over.

  “So, what is your recommendation?” Gordon asked. “I mean… there’s no way for us to find out what happened. Who might have mixed up or intentionally switched samples? Is there?”

  “Are you willing to do DNA testing to find out? We can do maternity and paternity tests to see which of you, if either, is biologically related to the babies. And who is not.”

  “Bridget is against doing any testing of her own DNA. I’m not sure, but… I think she’s afraid of finding out that she has some bad gene… that breast cancer one, maybe. For someone who has already been through cancer treatment… well, you can see how that could be devastating.”

  Zachary hadn’t even thought about that. And it would be. Bridget was strong, or she wouldn’t have survived what she already had. But she didn’t need to be told that she was going to develop another kind of cancer. Or one of the other big diseases. Some kind of degenerative disease that they didn’t have any cure for. He could understand why she would not want to face something like that.

  “Yeah, okay. I can see how she might feel that way.”

  “Don’t say anything to her about it. She hasn’t told me that. She’s only said that she won’t do any kind of DNA testing. I can only surmise.”

  “I’m not exactly going to be talking to her about it.”

  Gordon chuckled. “No, I don’t imagine you will be.”

  “You could still test the babies’ DNA against yours, see whether or not you are the father. That may not be a full answer, but it could be a beginning. Prove whether you are or are not the father of the babies.”

  “But to do that prenatally, Bridget has to have another procedure. She would have to know about it. They would have to do either amnio or blood testing. We can’t exactly do that covertly.”

  “No, I guess not. You might have to wait until after the children are born. Then get a cheek swab.”

  “I don’t know whether she is going to carry them to term. She agreed to give us some time to think about it. But I suspect I know what her decision will be. She’s going to want to terminate.”

  A wave of nausea passed over Zachary. How many people in the world would have given anything to be able to raise those babies? Including him. He’d always been more baby-hungry than Bridget. He remembered helping to raise his younger siblings. There was nothing like holding a new baby in his arms. Nothing else in his life had come close.

  “What if she carries them to term… and then adopts them out?”

  Gordon didn’t answer immediately. When he did speak, his tone was bemused. “Why would we do that? If she carries the babies to term, we will raise them. We wouldn’t give them to someone else.”

  “I just meant, if she didn’t want them because of Huntington’s Disease. I’m sure there would still be couples out there who would want to adopt them.”

  “Adopt a baby with a fatal disease?”

  “A disease that won’t kill them until they are middle-aged or older? Sure. I remember hearing about people adopting babies with HIV, back when it was a death sentence.”

  “No. We’re not interested in doing that. I would prefer Bridget carry this pregnancy to term, but if she doesn’t want to, then… I guess we’ll try again.”

  Or not.

  Bridget might decide that there was no way she was going through it all again. The morning sickness, the weight, all of the aches and pains that she suffered because of the pregnancy. And whatever was going on inside that made her worried that there was something wrong with the babies.

  “What if she doesn’t want to try again?”

  “She may not. She wasn’t too sure about it the first time. It might be too much to ask for her to try again. And she doesn’t have a lot of eggs banked. I don’t think we could try again more than once.”

  Zachary was glad to hear of that. He didn’t know how he would handle it if he had to watch Bridget go through multiple pregnancies, trying again and again for the perfect baby. Or having however many children Gordon wanted, her body getting stretched and soft, turning into a matronly figure.

  He had wanted her to be the mother of his children as much as she had wanted him to be the perfect spouse and partner for social functions. They each had a very distorted picture of what the other could be. He knew it had been unrealistic to expect her to be the perfect mother he had imagined. Even if she went on to have Gordon’s children, she wouldn’t be the kind of mother he fantasized about. The type of mother he had always longed for. That was as much a product of his imagination as the Easter Bunny.

  It wasn’t possible and it never had been.

  “I don’t know what else I can suggest,” Zachary said slowly. “I can ask the clinic for some references, and investigate whether anyone who had babies recently has a family history of Huntington’s, but that would be a long shot. It’s not exactly the kind of thing that people advertise. But I probably can’t even find out the names of everyone who works there, down to the receptionist and janitorial staff.”

  “Let me think about that. It may depend completely on whether Bridget has made a decision yet. If she is still determined to have the pregnancy terminated… well, there’s not much we can do about it, is there? Not much point in investigating any further. If she did decide to have a go at another IVF implantation… I would insist we go to another clinic.”

  “Yeah. That makes sense. Okay, then, I’ll wait to see what you decide.”

  16

  Zachary went on with other investigative work. There wasn’t anything more to do about Gordon’s case. His surveillance of Bridget was done. He was both disappointed and relieved about it at the same time. He was disappointed because Bridget was like a drug he was addicted to. He loved to see her and follow her. He could spend all day every day just following her around like a puppy.
>
  And he was relieved for the same reason. He knew he shouldn’t be indulging his compulsion to track her and be close to her. He had been able, with medication changes and therapy, to stop once. He wasn’t sure he would be able to stop again. The more he saw of her and followed her, the harder it would be to stop again.

  He didn’t want to end up in jail because she spotted him one day. She would take out a restraining order. He wouldn’t be able to stop. He’d get arrested and thrown in the clink and, as soon as he got out, he would be watching her again.

  He couldn’t let that happen. So it was a good thing that the retainer was at an end and he didn’t have any more excuse to follow her.

  He wasn’t expecting to get a call back from Gordon so quickly. It took him by surprise. He looked at his phone face and then glanced across the table at Kenzie’s face. He hesitated, trying to decide whether to reject the call and try Gordon back later, or whether to be rude to Kenzie and take it in the middle of the meal.

  She clearly saw the dilemma in his face. “If you really need to, then go ahead.”

  He waited for one more instant, but was afraid that Gordon would hang up and Zachary would miss the call.

  “Just be a minute,” he promised, getting up from the table and swiping the call at the same time. He didn’t put it up to his face and answer immediately, waiting until he could duck into Kenzie’s bedroom and shut the door for some privacy.

  “Gordon?”

  “Ah, Zachary. I was afraid it was going to voicemail. Sorry to bother you tonight, I know it isn’t exactly office hours.”

  “Yeah. No problem. I wasn’t expecting to hear back from you so soon.”

  “I had a thought.”

  “Yes?” Zachary was inexplicably relieved that it wasn’t because Bridget had already made the decision to terminate.

  He hated to think about how sick the possibility made him. He needed to let Bridget go.

  He had to let her go.

  He shouldn’t have taken the job in the first place, and he had known it at the time.

  “You already started an investigation into the clinic.”

  “Right. Only preliminary. I have the brochures and such, did a tour to check out their security procedures. If there is something else you want me to ask, I can do a follow-up call.”

  “Yes. What if you do background checks on the doctors? At least the main ones? It probably isn’t likely that a brand-new doctor would have the guts to do something like that, intentionally swapping sperm samples for his own. More than likely, that’s one of the more established doctors, right?”

  “I’m not sure. If it was one of the older doctors, then it’s probably been going on for some time. If it’s been going on for a long time, wouldn’t someone have figured it out? There would at least be some investigations made by whatever the governing body is. Maybe a reprimand or some black mark against his name. Directions that he had to follow some specific procedure, or had to undergo counseling. Something.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Gordon said. “He must have left a trail. If this has been going on for some time, there must be some rumors, some reprimand, like you say. Maybe even previous lawsuits. Not necessarily against the clinic, but against one of the doctors. Maybe it’s someone who has just recently started at the clinic, so they haven’t had this happen before. Because they don’t know his background, what happened to him before.”

  It could be challenging to catch unethical doctors. The profession didn’t want people to mistrust doctors, so they didn’t like to make everything public. They would keep it low-key, trying to keep the public’s trust. Discipline the doctor quietly and impose some penalty. Maybe even take away his license to practice medicine. Then the doctor moved to a different state and tried again. Zachary knew some of them turned into serial offenders.

  If a doctor had a compulsion to impregnate as many women as possible, then, like Zachary’s compulsion to follow Bridget, it would be hard to resist the impulse. And the more he indulged the desire, the harder it would be to stop. He wouldn’t stop just because he’d been caught once. He would keep going until he was behind bars.

  “Yeah, you may have something there,” he admitted. “I have the brochures, that will give me the names of the major players. I can start with them, see who the most recent additions to the clinic are. If they’re telling the truth and have never had any issues before, he might not have reached the tipping point where enough parents have started to ask questions. Most couples don’t do prenatal DNA tests. But there might be some traits that don’t fit in the family. Why does Johnny have blue eyes? Where did he get celiac disease from? That kind of thing.”

  He could imagine Gordon’s piercing eyes and his eager nod. “Yes. Good man. You have it. Can you do that for me? See if you can figure out who did this. It may be too late for us, but if we can stop him from impregnating someone else…”

  Zachary was struck again by how much of a violation it was. He was furious at whoever had done this to Bridget. Even if it had not been a violent, personal attack, it still felt like it. Even if the man who had mixed or substituted his own sperm to fertilize the eggs had never been in the same room as Bridget, he had still violated her. Zachary gulped, trying to keep his anger under control.

  He would find out who had done it. All it would take was a little detective work.

  17

  The next morning, Zachary spent an hour pulling all the names that he could from the brochures and the website for the clinic and then going over them with Heather. They split the names up so that they could get through them more quickly. Zachary explained what he was looking for, and gave Heather some pointers on the searches she would need to have done and the people or organizations that she would have to talk to. How to best get the information they needed from people who might be under a gag order or have signed a confidentiality agreement. While the beginning steps would be ones that Heather was familiar with, she needed a few more pointers on the steps to take after that.

  Kenzie called him midway through the morning while he was running one name after another through the databases. Zachary was surprised. Usually, when she was at work, she wouldn’t call him, except maybe at noon to see how he was doing while she had her lunch.

  It must have been a slower day at the morgue.

  “Hey, Kenz. What’s up?”

  “I was wondering if you were still working on that Huntington’s Disease case. Or have you already put that one to bed?”

  “Still working on it.” Zachary tried to pull his attention away from the list of names. Switching gears could be a problem when he was deep into something. “Did you think of something?”

  “Well, I had been doing a little bit of research into whether it could be sporadic, you know, and I’ve been talking to Dr. Wiltshire about it this morning.”

  Zachary didn’t know how much the medical examiner would know about Huntington’s Disease, but he would take what he could get. They would both have more experience than he did about the ins and outs of the genetics.

  “Yeah. Did you find anything? Everybody I’ve talked to says that if one parent has it, the kids each have a fifty percent chance of getting it. If both parents have it, then the kids have a higher chance of getting it, but still not one hundred percent.”

  “Right.”

  “But if neither of the parents have it, then there’s no way the kids would, right? Or did you find out something different?”

  “Well, I discovered it is a little more nuanced than that. You have to change your thinking about how it works.”

  “Okay.” Zachary closed his laptop screen so he wouldn’t be distracted by it. He closed his eyes, trying to focus all of his attention on Kenzie’s words. “I’m ready.”

  “When we’re talking about genes to the general population, we are usually talking about a binary model. Right? You think of someone as either having the gene or not having the gene.”

  “Yes… except I know that you can have dif
ferent versions. Dominant or recessive. You can have a gene, but if it is recessive, then you don’t see it.”

  “And with something like Huntington’s Disease, then it is autosomal dominant, which means that you don’t have to inherit two copies of it, like you would for something like cystic fibrosis. You only have to inherit one copy of it.”

  “Right.”

  “But I want you to forget the binary model. It is not a matter of having the HD gene or not having the HD gene.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. It’s a matter of how many CAG repeats you have.”

  Zachary opened his eyes and frowned at the phone. Kenzie wasn’t kidding when she said he would have to think about it in a different way. He didn’t have any idea what CAG repeats were.

  “Stay with me, Zach. I’ll get you up to speed.”

  “Okay. CAG repeats.”

  “So, everyone has CAG repeats on the Huntington’s allele. That’s normal.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Some people have just a few repeats. If they have under twenty-six repeats, then they do not get Huntington’s Disease.”

  “Okay.” Zachary could understand that so far.

  “Some people have lots of repeats. If they have over forty repeats, they will synthesize a mutated huntingtin protein and develop Huntington’s Disease. They start experiencing dementia and other symptoms mid-to-late life.”

  “Oh. Okay. So a few repeats, they don’t get Huntington’s, a lot, they do.”

  “And if they have an extremely high number of repeats, they might even develop Huntington’s in childhood. That is very rare.”