by Chris Leibig
“Mind if I smoke?”
“Your house.” Sam pulled out his own pack and lit a cigarette himself. Tamika slid the plastic ashtray to the middle of the table, her eyes skittishly dodging away from Sam’s as his mind delved into hers. He briefly wondered how much Tamika could perceive about what was occurring between them.
“Tamika, you seem like a nice person, so I didn’t want to bring this up in court in front of everyone.”
Tamika stared blankly at Sam. Nothing. And nothing.
“I know why you lied about Acorn, Tamika. I know why and I understand. Tell the truth, and I’ll make sure your friend keeps thinking you were raped. I promise. But you gotta come clean, or he’s eventually going to find out about you and Acorn. It’s your only play, Tamika.”
Tamika sighed. “I’m gonna get locked up, ain’t I?”
“I can stop ’em from charging you with perjury. But you gotta act now and drop the charges.”
Tamika blew smoke out of the side of her mouth.
“Fuck it. If it’s not one fuckin’ thing, it’s another. Will you represent me?”
•••
Juliana lay on her couch in the dark. Drawn shades blocked the blazing summer sun.
“It might not be that big a deal.” Sam spoke with confidence and delivered Juliana a soft mental massage. He felt her frantic brain loosen just a bit under the weight of his warmth.
“We’re friends, so what? Friends talk about work, right?” He said it, but he was not sure he believed it.
“I was the lead scientist on the biggest case in the United States. They talk about it on cable news every night. It’s on the news in fucking China. I blew it. The FBI just took over the case. DFS has been—”
“You don’t know why they shut down the lab today. It can’t be because you brainstormed a hardly secret DNA investigation with a public defender. What, exactly, did you tell this guy?”
Juliana took a deep breath. “You cut me off earlier. Before the Lucas murder, I ran a swab from the stem of your chalice. Just in case the guy had left sweat on it when he took the sip. I got a strong profile across fifteen loci, but something wasn’t right. The optical density was strong across the board, but the profile was homozygotic at all fifteen.”
“English, Juliana.”
“Homozygotic means that at certain loci, a person will appear to have only one genetic marker instead of two. It means the person got the same genetic marker from both parents at those loci. If one of the killer’s markers at one of the nine loci is a homozygote, it means we actually know both of his markers at that location.”
“Okay, so whoever touched the chalice got the same alleles from each parent. I get it.”
“It can’t happen,” Juliana said. “The odds are just too high. Lots of people are homozygotic at one or two loci, but all fifteen? I’ve never seen it. I did odds on it. Inbreeding can account for some extra matchup among one’s parents’ genetic markers, but the odds of somebody being homozygotic at all loci are probably one in ten to a power greater than fifty. That’s one with fifty zeroes after it, the threshold at which physicists are willing to call an event impossible.”
“How can anything with odds be impossible?”
“I tend to agree. Statistics play games on the mind. Many events that actually happen carry ridiculous odds before they happen.”
“Like the lottery, right?”
“Not like the lottery, smart guy. With the lottery, they keep playing the same exact game until someone wins. Under that scenario, an eventual winner is guaranteed. The high odds on the lottery are not that the numbers will eventually hit, but that you will have those numbers. Anyway, last night, Detective Massey delivered Zebulon Lucas’s hat to the lab. Massey was sitting right there while I ran preliminary results. The hat swab contained a DNA mixture. One contributor was Zeb himself, who I typed for elimination purposes. The foreign DNA in the mixture matched the chalice grabber at ten loci. Again, all homozygotic. At this point, it’s like ten o’clock, the very day of the murder, and I’m realizing that I have this chalice that probably has the saliva of the Joni West bra snapper on the rim and the skin cells of the Zebulon murderer on the stem—and they are different profiles. And of course, I promised you forty-eight hours, but Massey is standing right there, and I’m freaking out.
“Massey’s telling me that Zebulon is definitely a Ripper victim. The location and all. The manner of death. And the chief’s already been on TV saying Lucas was offed by the Ripper. But Lucas’s elimination profile kind of rang a bell and Jesus, I almost shit—it matches what we have on the bra snapper. And I’m like, holy fuck, Zebulon touched West’s bra. I gotta do something, like now. And you weren’t answering your phone …”
Juliana was sitting up now, gesturing wildly. Sam walked to the kitchen and poured two glasses of wine, draining the half-empty bottle Juliana had already begun.
“Keep going,” he said. But his mind was racing. Slow time. Observe.
“So I leave the lab and go to Harpoon Hannah’s, thinking maybe you would show up, and I start drinking vodka tonics. Slowly at first, then I guess I kicked into overdrive.”
Sam watched her carefully.
“It’s a little fuzzy from there on. But next thing I know I’m standing outside, talking on my cell phone with my Main Justice counterpart, a lab guy from DC, and I’m going on and on, and he’s trying to slow me down.” Juliana took a large gulp of wine. “I’m sorry, Sam.”
“What did you tell him?”
“How the fuck should I know? But I do remember saying chalice, saying it’s a fucking chalice! I was yelling it into the phone. And I think, I mean, I’m almost 100 percent sure, I didn’t say your name. So I get to work today and the place is swarming with agents. They sent us all home. They wouldn’t let us take any lab documents out of the building or our laptops. Dr. Agress told us he would be in touch. Then I came home and called you.”
Sam put his hands on Juliana’s knees and met her eyes.
“It’s okay. Really. Everything you did came from a good place.”
Juliana sighed deeply. “You just need to know, I couldn’t bring anything out of the building. Anything. The Diagnostia cert is in a folder on my desk, and the chalice is in a bag next to my computer.”
Sam squeezed Juliana’s shoulders. “You’ve done nothing wrong. Shit, when they find me, which could be a day or more, I’ll tell him I brought the chalice to you and you insisted, against my wishes, to bring it to them, which you then did. You’re fine.”
“What about you?”
“Attorney-client privilege; I can’t divulge anything. And I haven’t revealed my client’s name. Not even to you. When you get questioned, tell the truth. You’ve done nothing but your job.”
And in a moment of mutual need, they let it go at that, in effect pretending that something as murky as a legal privilege would cover Sam for having failed to report information that could have saved a life. Not in a case this big. Not with a new murder after Sam saw the chalice result.
Sam pulled his new Diagnostia result from his briefcase, slipped the manuscript lab sheet out of the folder, and handed it to Juliana.
“Yes or no?”
Juliana studied it carefully. “Without the chalice grabber or Zebulon lab sheets in front of me, I can’t say for sure, but my memory is usually pretty good on these charts. Obviously, it’s partial. All homozygotic. And as far as I recall, all the alleles match. So yes, it looks like this profile could come from the chalice grabber and could not come from the chalice sipper.”
“And according to you that means it’s also the same profile as the guy who planted Zeb’s hat back on his head after offing him, right?”
Juliana sighed. “It appears so.”
“Same guy—the manuscript, the chalice stem, and the hat?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
Sam stood to leave. “Hang in there. You’re a great scientist, Juliana. They need you.”
“Great or
not, I’ll be labeled a nut case after the unscientific theory I floated last night. Jesus, I feel like a nut case.” She looked scared.
“What’s the nutty theory?”
Juliana did not respond right away, but looked down, shaking her head quickly from side to side, like a cringe of sorts.
“Never mind.”
•••
Sam sat behind the wheel of the Escalade, counting his breaths. He released the emergency brake, cranked the motor, and gunned it up over the steep hill, briefly noting the view of the county spread out below him. He descended rapidly, his engine softly humming through the quiet night. He looked at the manuscript on the seat beside him. Just before Sam entered his own neighborhood, he pulled into the lot of an empty 7-Eleven, with its rows of cold beers and shelves of cheap wine, his soldiers, waiting to be ordered into battle. He figured he had at least a day before they showed up. They would get his cell phone records first. Track his movements with cell-site data, match up his calls with his locations, which of course would initially only show them that he was all over the place all the time, making dozens of calls to dozens of people a day. Hah, they would get excited when they saw Steve Buterab’s number all over his records. They would initially focus on a few false leads. They were good, but investigations took time. It would be at least a day before they showed up at his door, and even longer before they got agents out to the Church of the Holy Angels. By then he would figure out what to do.
Back at home, Sam poured a full glass of wine, snapped on some fresh latex gloves, raised the glass to his lips, leaned back on the couch, and flipped opened the journal.
CHAPTER 17
APRIL 3, 1958
Guevara is a disappointment. A spoiled baby. Childish. Not particularly smart. And mean like a hungry Bariloche dog—not hungry for food but for righteousness. His primary talent, which appears to be training men in guerrilla warfare, stems from a relentlessness I liken to the ability of a rat that chews its way through a tin can to get to some meat.
Guevara has trained us along with the other recruits. More arrive regularly. For whatever reason—age, I suppose—our training has consisted of recycling shell casings by filling them with powder and inserting them into the cartridge belts worn across the chests of the men. We also haul jugs of water in sacks for hours to practice delivering them to the men during combat. Mainly, though, we serve as helpers to the group of women who cook for the men. There are two female soldiers. Both are gritty and beautiful in their sweaty camouflage, and both, to my great interest, appear to have Che’s ear and even the respect of Raul Castro, whom I finally saw today. Today I also approached Che and asked why it was that I should not be allowed to fight. He placed his hand on my shoulder. “You have the heart of a panther, comrade. All roles in our struggle are equally important. Play yours.” Those were his exact words and lovely ones in his educated Argentine accent (so different than the Bariloche trash). But then Che traipsed off, his tumultuous mind grappling with one communistic truism or another. As I write, I can feel Che’s mind at war with itself from the other side of camp. Such tumult is not a great quality in a leader, but it does make for an interesting little scuffle. Rather endearing, like the bravado of young boys on a playground.
•••
AUGUST 10, 1958
The war is on. Bands of men leave our camp in groups of several dozen, usually returning after small skirmishes in the fringes of the mountains. And without casualties. Today was the first time a soldier with substantial wounds returned to camp, and it was Di Giorgio. Che (while a comandante, leader, and fighter) is the only medical doctor in the camp. He scrambled to examine Di Giorgio’s chest wound while barking orders. I ran to Di Giorgio, knelt beside him, and held his hand. Che applied pressure to the wound while screaming towards one soldier or another to boil water and retrieve clean bandages. Sweat streamed down Che’s face and, during a moment when only the two of us surrounded Di Giorgio, Che’s eyes met mine. “Place your hands like so. I’ll be back.” He quickly glanced behind him and then dashed away in the direction of his tent, leaving me with both palms pressing down on the deep wound on the right side of Di Giorgio’s chest.
Di Giorgio’s eyes, while open, were half vacant. What an end for him, bleeding in the mountains while Guevara tries to save him. He could not have planned it any better. I truly felt sadness for Di Giorgio, and as I do from one time to another, I said a brief word under my breath, directed at all that was around and above. Che returned and slid in next to me holding a thick, tan compression bandage, bound up with some sort of belt. When Che’s hands replaced mine on the wound, his face froze. He looked around, then at me. He shrugged.
“I must be losing my mind out here. I thought he was a dead man. It only grazed him.” Che, his exuberance regained, laughed with joy and clenched his fists over his head. He playfully patted Di Giorgio on the cheeks. “You will live, comrade!” Che sprang to his feet and strutted away, yelling his usual orders. “Stop that bleeding! All comrades in formation in one hour. We’re moving out! We’re moving out!”
I bandaged Di Giorgio’s superficial wound and then joined Paul, who was sitting quietly against the base of a thick tree. He had watched the whole thing. We did not speak, but in merry symbiosis, we laughed together. I looked at my hands, bloody yet normal. So human. Today was the first day since Salome that I did not think about how I deserved to be dead and in hell or, like Job, suffering a punishing slavery at the hand of the Great One. Until just now, I suppose, but only by noticing the absence of such thoughts.
•••
SEPTEMBER 1, 1958
Some of the men are getting scared as they sense the imminence of our departure from the safe havens of our mountain hideouts. So often at quieter times they sit in circles and discuss their philosophies. Or sometimes they read political books with flashlights before they sleep. A teenage soldier, a white Mexican named Cecil, gave me a book he finished today. Indeed, I have seen him reading it for days though it is a thin book one could read in an hour. Cecil always has a smile, but these last few days his cheeriness has become a dark gloom. When he handed me the book he made a self-indulgent statement such as, all men must die or some other nonsense. This new fatalism of his plainly comes from Cecil’s fear. He likely loved the political books he studied at university but this business about getting shot at has gotten him all trembly. The book, though, was not communist propaganda but a book with Jesus in it called The Grand Inquisitor. It is apparently a segment of a larger book by a well-known Russian writer named Dostoyevsky. The book fascinates me and indeed echoes some of my less-developed thoughts about the Great God and Jesus. In the book an old Spanish man, the Inquisitor, whose business it has been to burn non-believers at the stake, encounters Jesus in his very prison camp. Instead of falling to his knees to praise his God, he essentially curses him for setting up such ridiculous expectations of humanity while at the same time declining to prove to them that he and his Father even exist. The Inquisitor, as I have, questions Jesus’s refusal to prove his power to Satan in the desert. So silly, that the Great One’s son won’t provide us proof, yet his father destroyed Job on what amounts to no more than a gentleman’s bet with Satan. And the two things are the same in this way—neither the Great One nor his son will help their creatures when it counts. At the end of the Inquisitor’s rant, instead of consoling or explaining, Jesus merely kisses the Inquisitor, thus providing no information to a man who has devoted his life to saving souls who have no hope to navigate human freedom and save themselves. Jesus kisses him on his “bloodless” lips. Why bloodless? He is old I suppose. But the writer must have meant more than that. I sympathize with the points made by this Inquisitor. His words remind me of my mother’s words about Job and me. One must be strong inside, and not expect any help from above, now or ever. I shut the book and took a deep breath. The Inquisitor tried to sue God. And like always with the Great One and his son—nothing.
I have this small book practically memorized a
fter two readings this evening. I gave it to Di Giorgio, who flipped through it and tossed it aside.
•••
SEPTEMBER 9, 1958
Paul and I share a donkey. Often we follow along a grassy road behind a column of hundreds of raggedy revolutionaries. This is war. No more running around in the trees. Our column marches east, out of the mountains and straight towards Havana. For mile after mile, marching soldiers block our view in front while tall sugar cane looms along both sides like a menacing maze. It is said we will meet Batista’s soldiers in open battle. The baskets adorning the sides of our donkey carry bullets, some old pistols, and, tied tightly in a blanket, a half-dozen of American grenades.
Today I awoke as the sun rose and caught sight of Che angrily lecturing a circle of young lieutenants (I call them lieutenants; they bear no sign of rank). He met my eyes from far away and dwelt on them longer than he ever had before. He had no real idea about why he took such an interest, unable to see even a fragment of my nature. Hours later, I learned from one of the crusty old maids who does the cooking that Paul and I would be attached, out of the three possible choices, to Che’s column.
•••
NOVEMBER 11, 1958
Today Paul and I wielded rifles and fired at the tan-coated soldiers during a skirmish near San Martin. After the battle, I saw Che order the execution of fifteen Batista soldiers. His sloppy firing squad killed less than half the men on the first round. Che, fiery satisfaction plastered on his face, dispatched them one after another with his pistol. When it jammed after four of these murders, he threw it across the field, where it stuck in a mud puddle. Then he screeched at a lieutenant to give him another gun. The men in our column exchanged nervous glances. Many just stared at the ground. That’s how it is, a few Che Guevaras and a thousand cowards. Che thinks it’s politics. At least I know better.
After the murders, I heard Che say to the rest of the men, “An army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep.” He said it was a quote from Alexander the Great. I assume Alexander the Great is a soldier, or a warrior from some time in the past, but I doubt a great warrior would say that. I think Che has a talent for finding reasons to believe in the righteousness of his own evil acts. A gift, I suppose. Indeed, maybe I can learn to do the same.