Brood XIX (6 page)

Vanessa crossed the hall and checked the
bathroom. Emma's hairbrush, toothbrush, and half-squeezed tube of
toothpaste were still on the counter next to the sink, her smudged
fingerprints on the corner of the medicine cabinet mirror. She saw
hazy shapes through the opaque glass of the shower stall at the
rear: bottles of shampoo and conditioner stacked on the edge of the
tub. Used towels hanging on the rack. It still smelled like Emma's
soap.

The noise definitely originated from farther
down the hall.

Her bedroom---the master she had once shared
with her husband---was to the left. Directly ahead, a small linen
cabinet barely large enough to hold some towels and cleaning
supplies. To the right was a bedroom slightly smaller than Emma's
that they had converted into Warren's home office. The sound was
coming from in there, on the other side of the door that was always
kept closed. She hadn't been able to bring herself to go in there
since his death. She knew that once she did, she would have to
begin boxing up and clearing out his belongings, which would
ultimately lead to erasing his existence from a house that would no
longer feel like her home.

She took a deep breath and opened the door.
The office still looked like he had just stepped out to refill his
mug of coffee or use the bathroom, as though at any moment he might
slip past her through the doorway and plop down on his worn leather
chair. From time to time, she opened the door long enough to allow
the air to circulate and imagined him sitting there at his desk,
combing through his records on the computer in anticipation of the
coming day's appointments, researching test results, and following
up on the financial end of his practice. Billing was contracted out
to an agency, but the bottom line was that he and his partner were
responsible for keeping their office in the black. It was a small
practice in an even smaller town, which meant that maintaining any
kind of profit margin required constant oversight. Warren could
have easily made twice as much over in Dallas; however, it had been
important for her to stay in Jefferson, where she had been raised
and where she wished to raise her child, and so it had been
important to him, as well. Besides, he liked the idea of being a
small-town physician. Half of the town relied upon him. It made him
feel necessary, gave him a greater sense of worth. And like old Dr.
Patterson, from whom Warren had purchased the practice upon his
retirement, he got a kick out of making the occasional house call
to the outer fringes of the city limits, just like real doctors
used to do back in the day. When it had been a noble service
profession, and not an assembly-line, treat'em-and-street'em
job.

She flipped on the lights.

The cicadas were crawling all over the
keyboard and the computer monitor on the antique maple desk. Their
fat bellies filled and deflated as they sang.

For the first time in two years, she crossed
the threshold. It smelled of dust, but there was still the faintest
hint of Warren's aftershave and the hazelnut coffee he loved so
much. She felt as though she were stepping into the past, into a
better time when the future was only a dream.

She nudged his chair aside and watched the
black and gold insects scurry over the keyboard and the monitor,
their eyes like twin globules of blood. Those on the screen took
flight and buzzed around her head. She waved them away as those on
the keyboard continued to sing.

Several cicadas alighted on the mouse. Warren
must have only put the computer into sleep mode, for even the
slight application of their weight brought the monitor to life,
bright even through the skein of dust.

The screen displayed a page from a website
called RapiDx, a site for physicians that featured tools to aid in
the diagnosis and treatment of a wide array of skeletal and
physiological maladies using primarily radiographs and lab values
from blood draws.

This was the last page Warren had ever
viewed, the last diagnosis to occupy his mind.

The page showed x-rays of knees that appeared
swollen and deformed, the cortices of the distal femora bowed
outward to accommodate patchy black lucencies that lent an almost
moth-eaten appearance.

Osteosarcoma.

* * *

Trey knew it was a fool's proposition. There
was just something about the way Vanessa had asked, about the aura
of what could have passed for serenity exuding from her, that gave
him pause. Between the dental records and the DNA match of the hair
samples, there was more than enough concrete evidence to guarantee
the proper identification had been made, but the more he
contemplated it, the less convinced he became.

He sat at his desk with the forwarded dental
files open on the screen in front of him. The monitor showed the
two sets of x-rays, side-by-side. On the left, the broken and
reassembled teeth. On the right, the film from Emma's last visit to
the dentist prior to her abduction. The fillings, the unfilled
caries...they matched up perfectly. So perfectly that none of them
had noticed the obvious. All of the teeth had been broken at the
roots. Most of them were chipped or cracked in some fashion. All of
them, in fact, with the exception of the three with metal fillings
and the two with existing cavities. Factoring out the sharp breaks
along the root-line, they were otherwise intact. The exact teeth
they had needed to determine the identity...and they were so well
preserved they might as well have been bagged and tagged before
they were buried.

Then there was the hair. Had there been
enough of it there to completely cover a child's head? With the
complete dissolution of the flesh, there had been no scalp to
confirm that the hair had ever been attached to the body. Was it
possible that the teeth and hair had been planted in order to make
the identification of the remains so simple that no one ever
bothered to investigate the skeleton itself? The bones had been so
badly broken in so many places that there had been no reason to
delve deeper. The cause of death been had fairly apparent, but had
the child really died from the beating, or was the condition of the
body just another part of the deception like the teeth and hair?
Even if this burgeoning theory held water, why would anyone go to
so much trouble to hide the identity of a different dead child? Why
take the risk of abducting another little girl if only for her hair
and teeth? And none of this implied that Emma was still alive. For
all he knew, she was buried somewhere out there in the bayou, as
well, with larvae feasting on her carcass and gnawing the marrow
out of her bones.

The phone on his desk rang. He recognized the
number on the Caller ID and had it to his ear before the second
ring.

"Walden."

"What do you know that we don't?" Packard
asked.

"Not a thing. I was following a hunch. I take
it you were able to compare the DNA from the bones."

"Yeah."

"I'm too tired to play Twenty Questions. Out
with it already."

"Let me ask you a question first. Remember
how the right knee was misshapen?"

"You mean that crater that looked like it had
started to rot where it was broken?"

"We weren't paying close enough attention.
Usually, some of the best DNA samples can be extracted from a slice
of the femur. We cut just above the crater and exposed a generous
portion of the cortex and cancellous bone, which clearly revealed
that it wasn't a traumatic fracture. What do you suppose it
was?"

"I have no idea."

"Neoplastic cells with osteoblastic
differentiation."

"In English."

"A tumor, Walden. A massive osteosarcoma. Did
your niece have cancer?"

"Not that any of us were aware of," Trey
whispered. He was already running through the implications in his
mind.

"You would have known. A tumor like that? She
would have been in a great deal of pain. The survival rate of a
cancer like this is only about two in three, even with aggressive
chemo and radiation treatments."

"What about the DNA?"

"The bone didn't match the hair. As far as an
ID, I can't tell you who it is without another sample to compare it
against, but I can definitely tell you who it isn't."

There was a long moment of silence. Static
crackled across the distance.

"The body isn't Emma's," Trey finally
said.

"Nope."

"So where in the name of God is she? Why
would someone stage the burial to make us think the remains were
hers?"

"We need to start with whose body it really
is. Now, let me give you something else to chew on. The broken
bones? The lack of periosteal reaction suggests that the breaks
were inflicted postmortem. This girl was already dead before
someone decided to kick the crap out of her corpse. What kind of
monster throws a dead child on the ground and stomps every bone in
her body, boots her in the face, and dumps her in the swamp with
another child's teeth and hair?"

"If she was dead before all of this happened,
do you have a formal cause of death?"

"Without the viscera, it's purely
theoretical."

"But?"

"We x-rayed the rest of the bones and found
them riddled with mets."

"The cancer killed her."

"Probably, but not very long before someone
set about destroying what was left of her."

"To make it look like Emma's body and that
she'd been bludgeoned to death."

Trey thanked Packard, hung up, and stared at
the ceiling. He suddenly had more questions than answers, the most
urgent of which was where was Emma?

Was it really possible that she was still
alive?

* * *

Vanessa clicked through the previously viewed
pages while the cicadas crawled over the top of the monitor, the
keyboard, and the desktop. All of the sites her husband had visited
prior to his death related to palliative, end-of-life, and hospice
care for patients in the terminal stages of cancer, specifically
for children with osteosarcoma. He appeared to have been working on
placing one of his patients at the Children's Cancer Center at the
MD Anderson Cancer Center of the University of Texas. But why?
Wasn't that the responsibility of the patient's parents? As a
physician, it was his job to follow through on a referral, not go
to such lengths on his personal time to do it for them. Why had he
taken it upon himself rather than coaching the child's family
through the process? The problem was that Warren believed so
strongly in a separation of his personal and professional lives
that he very seldom talked to her about it, and on those rare
occasions when he did, his sour mood had haunted him for days
before she had finally been able to pry his frustrations out of
him.

And most importantly, on which patient's
behalf had he been doing the research?

As one of two general practitioners in
Jefferson, he treated roughly half of the population. That was more
than a thousand patients right there, and surely more than a
quarter of them were children.

Vanessa couldn't see the immediate connection
between her daughter and another child dying of cancer, but she
couldn't shake the feeling that she had been led here, to this
computer and these websites, for a specific reason.

She brushed several of the large insects off
of the cordless phone and lifted the handset of the separate line
he used to handle his work affairs from home. The service had been
terminated years ago, but as she had never found the courage to
even attempt to clear out Warren's belongings, the phone itself had
never been unplugged. She scrolled through the memory of the Caller
ID. The most recent numbers all had the same area code and prefix.
She wrote them down on a dusty sticky-note and compared them to the
sites he had viewed. They matched the MD Anderson Cancer
Center.

She contemplated calling the numbers to find
out if they remembered her husband's calls or the name of the
proposed patient, but even on the off-chance that they were able to
recall the details from more than two years ago, the rules of
confidentiality prohibited them from sharing.

So what was the significance? Why had she
been guided to this information?

She closed her eyes and leaned back in the
chair. The emotional upheaval had taken a physical toll. She was
beyond exhausted. Her head ached. Her body ached. Her brain ached.
Maybe if she just managed to slip in a few hours of sleep, things
would make more sense. Maybe---

The cicada song grew louder.

Her eyes snapped open. All of the insects
were clinging to the computer screen and producing as much sound as
they possibly could. But they alone couldn't account for the sheer
volume, which felt like needles driven through her tympanic
membranes. She turned toward the window that afforded a view of the
front lawn and the street beyond. At first, she thought a storm
must have rolled in, that a thick bank of clouds blocked out the
moon and the stars. But no clouds could smother the light from the
streetlamp.

And then she noticed movement. The darkness
outside shifted like a black sea viewed from underwater.

She rose from the chair and crept hesitantly
toward the window. As she neared, her eyes drew contrast. Cicadas
covered the window from the outside, pressed so tightly together
that not a single ray of moonlight penetrated their ranks. She
raised her hand and touched the glass. It vibrated with the
ferocity of their song.

Vanessa recoiled and hurried out of the room.
The cicadas that had been in her husband's office followed her,
swirling around her head, tapping her cheeks. She ran down the
hallway, descended the stairs, crossed the living room, and threw
open the front door.

The sound that accosted her was like leaning
the side of her head against a jet engine. Her vision trembled.