Hush (20 page)

“She probably didn’t
want
a donor,” Alexis said. “She looked like she was in her early forties and she was probably hoping she could still have her
own
child. And I’m sure Sherman encouraged her just like he did me. He and Levin like to tell women, ‘You
will
get pregnant,’ as if they’re the Baby Makers. When Sherman found her eggs were useless, he was stuck. So he just used my embryos—without ever telling her.”

Over the past few weeks Lake had read enough about in vitro fertilization to understand the challenges faced by patients over forty. As part of IVF, a woman underwent hormone therapy to encourage the ovaries to release multiple eggs. Those eggs were then collected and placed in a petri dish with sperm from the woman’s partner—or, for an additional fee, even injected with sperm to facilitate fertilization. But if the woman was close to forty, or older, like Melanie, the chances for successful fertilization were slim. By that point in a woman’s life, her eggs had not only declined rapidly in number but also in quality—in fact, by the time a woman was forty-three, only about ten percent of her eggs were viable. The older the woman, the poorer the chances of harvesting enough viable eggs to fertilize and transfer back to her body. That’s why some clinics didn’t even take women over forty.

“And you never signed any kind of permission allowing them to share your eggs?”

“Never.”

“Have you confronted Sherman about this?” Lake asked.

“Of course. I called him after I’d figured out Melanie was a patient. He was totally patronizing. He told me I should talk to a psychologist who specializes in—quote—‘women like you.’”

“Did he suggest you talk to Harry Kline?”

“The psychologist they have on staff? No. I guess they only use him for the women they feel haven’t gone completely off the deep end yet and they can still milk for procedures.”

“Is there any way of getting a DNA test?”

“Not that I’ve found so far. Believe it or not, in these cases, the law protects the custodial parent—which is despicable. That’s
my
baby and she’s supposed to be with
me
.”

Lake glanced down at the photos again. It
was
uncanny how alike the two little girls looked. If Alexis was right and the clinic had done this to improve Melanie’s chances of conceiving, it likely wasn’t the first time—or the last.

“Do you think this woman, Melanie, has any suspicions that the child may not be hers?”

“I doubt it,” Alexis said. “If you’ve been desperate for a baby, you don’t allow yourself to question these things. And whether it was intentional or not, Sherman did a brilliant job of matching the coloring. This Melanie woman has light coloring like mine. And her husband’s probably fair as well. His name is Turnbull, a snooty English name.”

Lake felt her skin turn cold.
Melanie Turnbull
. She’d heard that name before—and recently.

And then she remembered. It was the name written on the scrap of paper she’d seen in the black bowl in Keaton’s loft.

“DO YOU
KNOW
her?” Alexis asked. She was studying Lake intensely and had seen the flicker of discomposure.

“No—of course not. I’m just trying to absorb everything.”

“So what are you going to do to help me?”

“What?” Lake asked distractedly. She could barely concentrate. In her mind she kept seeing the slip of paper in the bowl. Why did Keaton have Melanie Turnbull’s name? Had he stumbled onto something suspicious about her pregnancy? Maybe this was the reason he’d decided not to join the clinic. And maybe
this
was the reason he’d been murdered.

“You wanted the truth and I told you,” Alexis said fiercely. “Are—?”

“Let me ask you one more question,” Lake said, trying to find her footing again. “The day you spoke to Sherman—you didn’t talk to another doctor there, did you? Mark Keaton?”

“No,” Alexis said, annoyed, it seemed, at having been driven off
topic. “I’ve never even heard of him. So are you going to be able to get into the lab or not?”

“I definitely want to help, but what would getting into the lab do? I’m not sure what I’d be able to discover.”

“You could see what the people there are up to,” Alexis said. “You might overhear something important.”

“I seriously doubt they’d say anything incriminating in front of me, even if I did manage to spend any time in there. But look, I do have access to the charts—I actually looked at yours before. Now that I know about the Turnbulls, I can see if there’s anything in their chart linking the two of you.”

“Like what?”

“Well, they must have made some kind of notation in Melanie’s file indicating who they got the embryos from. With both files in front of me, I may be able to spot it.”

Alexis eyed her skeptically. “Maybe,” she said. She glanced away, thinking.

“There’s something you should be aware of,” Lake said. “Your chart indicated that you had only two embryos left. You told me there was a good amount.”

Alexis shook her head back and forth angrily.

“Those bastards,” she said. “So if Brian ever relents, they’ll just say I had fewer than I thought—or that some deteriorated.”

Unexpectedly, tears welled in Alexis’s eyes. It was the first time Lake had seen her look truly vulnerable.

“I’m going to do my best to help,” Lake said. “I’m headed to the clinic later today and will try to see the files. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

As Alexis walked Lake to the door, she grasped her arm so hard it hurt.

“I have to get my baby back,” Alexis said. “There has to be a judge who will give her to me, if you can prove what Sherman did.”

When Lake hurried out of the building minutes later, she saw the doorman study her curiously and she realized how rattled she must look. Halfway down the block toward Fifth Avenue she sank onto a stoop. Could Alexis’s story really be true? she wondered. It seemed so farfetched. And yet it couldn’t be a coincidence that Keaton had Melanie’s name.

If doctors at the clinic really were stealing embryos, they weren’t doing so just to make their patients wild with joy. It was obviously to improve their success rates and enhance the clinic’s reputation as a place that was expert at making older women pregnant. And that guaranteed greater profits.

This had to be why Keaton had been killed. He’d figured out somehow that Melanie had received someone else’s embryos and had decided to contact her.

Or what if Melanie had begun to have suspicions and reached out to
him
?

Lake dug her BlackBerry from her purse and called 411. There was a listing for a Steve and Melanie Turnbull in Brooklyn. She started to punch in the number and then paused. It was one thing to cold-call Alexis because she’d already approached Archer’s producer with her concerns, but what could Lake possibly say to Melanie? Your baby may not belong to you and we need to chat?

No, she would have to find something in Melanie’s file linking her to Alexis. Lake rose from the step and glanced at her watch. In nine hours she was due to give her presentation. She dreaded the idea of being back at the clinic, especially in light of what she now knew. She also dreaded the idea of going into the file room again. But she had to. Since there’d be no chance of going through the records after the presentation, as the clinic was closing, she needed to arrive early.

Back home she rehearsed her presentation several more times. She knew the only way to get through it tonight was to focus totally
on the slides and not on the people in the room. How utterly ironic it will be, she thought, when she reaches the slide about capitalizing on the clinic’s success with older women.

Melanie Turnbull flashed in her mind again. Lake started to worry about her plan to search the files once more; she had learned nothing from going through the patient charts so far. What, if anything, would she find tonight? She reconsidered talking directly to Melanie.

At around two she made a salad—just canned tuna and an onion so old it had thick green sprouts shooting from one end—and ate it listlessly. She felt stalled—marooned, really. She had told herself before that she needed to take action, to outsmart Levin as well as Jack, but she was just sitting here, betting on some paper files.

Without giving herself time to think it over anymore, she grabbed her BlackBerry from her purse and punched in Melanie’s number. A woman answered, sounding unhurried, pleased with the day, and in the background Lake could hear classical music playing and the babbling of a child. What a contrast, she thought, to Alexis Hunt’s sad apartment.

“Is this Melanie Turnbull?” Lake asked.

“Yes,” the woman said. “Who’s calling?”

“My name is Lake. I—I’m a friend of Dr. Mark Keaton’s. You two spoke, right?”

“What?” Melanie asked, sounding mildly irritated now. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Dr. Keaton—with the Advanced Fertility Center. He was murdered last week. I know that there were some—well, confidential things you needed to discuss with him. About your baby.”

The woman didn’t say anything for a moment, though Lake could hear the baby fussing in the background.

“Like I told you,” she finally said, all the softness gone from her
voice. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Do not call here again. Do you understand?”

A hard click followed. Damn, Lake thought. She’d blown her chance. She should have talked to Archer first and plotted out a clear strategy. Now everything rested again on what she could find in the files.

Feeling drained, she wandered into the living room and sank onto the couch. The drapes were pulled and the room was dim. She swung her legs up on the seat and closed her eyes. The last thing she remembered was Smokey hopping up next to her and nuzzling her face.

When she woke, she felt sticky, and her mind was fuzzy. She glanced nervously at her watch, worried about how long she’d slept. It was just after four. She had the odd sensation that a noise had woken her, though Smokey was nowhere in sight. She listened carefully. Then she heard the sound of her BlackBerry, ringing softly from the kitchen, where she’d left it. She shot up awkwardly from the couch and hurried to answer it. Maybe it’s Archer, she thought. But the screen said “caller unknown.”

“Lake,” a woman said.

“Yes,” Lake said quietly. She didn’t recognize the voice.

“This is Melanie Turnbull.”

Lake nearly gasped in surprise.

“Hello,” she said.

“I’ve been thinking about your call,” Melanie said. “And actually I do think we should talk.”

“Thank you,” Lake said, still taken aback. “As I said before, Dr. Keaton—”

“In person, though. I don’t want to do this over the phone. And as soon as possible.”

“Of course,” Lake said. “You tell me when and where.”

“Tonight. I want to get this over with.”

Lake winced. She wouldn’t be done with the presentation until at least seven.

“I have a little hitch tonight. I have to work until around seven.”

“That’s not a problem. I don’t want to do it until I’ve put my daughter to bed, anyway. At around nine?”

“Okay. Where should we meet?”

“I can’t come all the way into Manhattan so it’s going to have to be in Dumbo.” She gave the name of a restaurant on Front Street and said she’d meet her at the bar.

“Uh, that’s fine,” Lake said, jotting down the information. Melanie told her that she was tall with shoulder-length blond hair. Then she brusquely ended the call.

Lake felt like sobbing with relief. The fact that Melanie had called
her
had to mean something.

There were some logistics to work out. As long as she left the clinic at around seven-thirty she would reach the restaurant in time. Taking the subway there would be a hassle, though, involving at least one transfer, and it would be tough to find a taxi at that hour, and then again when heading back home. The smartest approach, she realized, would be to take her car. That meant driving to the clinic. She needed to get moving.

By the time she parked her car in a garage on the East Side, Lake felt fried. Traffic had been awful and the trip had taken longer than expected. She was wearing a black skirt and a pink jacket, and they both already looked rumpled, as if she’d picked them from a pile of worn clothes on the floor. But as she hurried down the street she knew she had bigger concerns tonight.

There were a few patients bunched at the reception desk and she skirted around them, heading directly toward the back. No one was at the nurses’ station, indicating that the staff was involved with patients. As she turned one corner she saw the backs of two
people in scrubs emerging from the OR—Sherman and Perkins, it looked like.

As soon as she entered the large conference room, her stomach began to roil. The last time she had been in this room was when Levin had announced Keaton’s murder and Hull and McCarty sat there like predators anxious to pick up a scent.

After unpacking her tote bag, she hooked up her laptop so that it fed into the flat-screen TV on the wall. Next she distributed pads and pencils around the table, a touch that a former boss had always insisted on. When she was done, she ran through the PowerPoint presentation.

“You’re early.”

Lake spun around and saw that the comment had come from Brie, who was standing in the doorway. Great, she thought. Brie had probably been sent to watch her like a hawk.

“I just wanted to run through my slides on the big screen,” Lake said, hearing the defensiveness in her voice and hating it.

“No problem,” Brie said, weirdly chipper for her. She was wearing a slim black dress and her lips were painted a nude color that made them almost recede into her face. “Everyone’s still finishing up with patients, so six-thirty is the earliest we can start.”

“Perfect,” Lake said, trying to smile. “Excuse me, you said everyone—who do you mean? Isn’t it just Dr. Levin and Dr. Sherman?”

“Dr. Levin asked a few others to join them. He thought it would be great to get their feedback.” Still that unnatural cheeriness. “Did you figure out how to hook up your laptop okay?”

“Um, yes, thanks,” Lake said.

“Well, just let me know if you need any help. I’m going to be in Dr. Hoss’s office going over a few things.”

As Brie left, closing the door behind her, Lake pressed the tips of her fingers to her lips, thinking. Why was Brie acting so helpful?
Was it because Lake’s work was almost done and she’d soon be out of Brie’s hair—or was something more sinister afoot? Maybe the geniality was an offshoot of devilish glee because Brie knew Lake was in trouble. In any case, Lake couldn’t worry about that now. She had to focus on sneaking into the file room, which she had fifteen minutes to do. The good news was that it sounded like Brie would be ensconced in Hoss’s office.

Lake slipped out of the conference room and looked both ways up and down the hall. No one was in sight. Quickly she made her way to the file room. This time she didn’t bother with the stepladder ruse. It hadn’t worked before anyway and she needed to make dead certain no one saw her this time. She shut the door firmly behind her.

She went to the drawers and quickly found the Turnbull chart. It wasn’t as thick as the Hunt chart, and as she thumbed quickly through the pages she saw that Melanie had indeed undergone two IVF procedures, the second resulting in a pregnancy. Though it was difficult to completely decipher the doctors’ notations, it seemed that only six eggs had been harvested the first time and only one embryo had made it to day three, which Lake knew was the first point it was viable to transfer embryos to the uterus for implantation. The low number wasn’t surprising if Melanie was in her forties, as Alexis had suggested, but it also meant that the chances of a pregnancy were very slim. The next IVF, however, produced eight eggs and six viable embryos. What a nice surprise, Lake thought mockingly. If Alexis was right, this was when
her
embryos had been used because Sherman realized Melanie had little chance on her own.

What Lake didn’t see was any notation that seemed to link this chart to another. She would have to pull Alexis’s chart and compare them side by side. But first she flipped to the front of the file to check Melanie’s age. According to her birth date, she’d
been forty-one at the time of her first in vitro. As Lake started to lay the file down on top of the open drawer, she noticed several letters, written in pencil, by Melanie’s name on her information form.
BLb
. It was similar to what she’d spotted in the Kastners’ file, but with different letters, she thought. Her eyes jerked toward Melanie’s husband’s name.
BLg
. Was this the code that linked one couple to another?

She glanced at her watch. To her shock, it was 6:28. She needed to look at Alexis’s file again, but she’d run out of time. Suddenly, from behind the door, she heard the muffled sounds of conversation. She froze. But the sound soon receded and she dropped the chart back into place. Lake eased the door open, peeking cautiously into the hall—no one was there—and quickly slipped from the room. Her heart was thumping so hard, she could hear the sound it made. As she hurried back to the conference room she could feel that the inside of her jacket was sticky with sweat.