Next: A Novel (13 page)

“Excuse me.”

He looked up. An Asian girl was sitting down next to him. He had never seen her before, but she was cute. Maybe eighteen or so.

“I’m really, really sorry,” she said, “but I have to call Emily’s parents”—she nodded toward one of the girls on the field—“and my battery died. Could I possibly use your phone? Just for a minute?”

“Uh, sure,” he said, handing her the phone.

“It’s just a local call.”

“No problem.”

She called quickly, saying something about it being the third quarter and they could come and pick her up soon. He pretended not to listen. She handed the phone back to him, her hand touching his. “Hey, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I haven’t seen you at any of the games before,” she said. “Do you come a lot?”

“Not as often as I’d like. Work, you know.” Bradley pointed to the field. “Which one is Emily?”

“The center forward.” She pointed to a black girl, on the other side of the field.

“I’m her friend. Kelly.” She extended her hand, shook his.

“Brad,” he said.

“Nice to meet you, Brad. And you’re here with…?”

“Oh, my niece is at the dentist today,” he said. “I didn’t find out until I was already here.” He shrugged.

“Nice uncle. She must really appreciate you coming. But you don’t seem old enough to be the uncle of one of the girls.”

He smiled. For some reason he felt nervous. Kelly was sitting very close, her thigh almost touching his. He couldn’t use his PDA or his phone. Nobody ever sat close like that.

“My parents are so old,” Kelly said. “My dad was fifty when I was born.” She stared out at the field. “I guess that’s why I like older guys.”

He thought, How old is she? But he couldn’t think of a way to ask her without being obvious.

She held her hands up, scrutinized them, fingers spread wide. “I just got my nails done,” she said. “You like this color?”

“Yes. Very good color.”

“My dad hates it when I get my nails done. He thinks it makes me look too mature. But I think it’s a good color. Hot love. That’s the name of the color.”

“Yes…”

“Anyway, all the girls get their nails done. I mean, comeon . I was getting my nails done in seventh grade. And besides, I graduated.”

“Oh, you graduated?”

“Yes. Last year.” She had opened her purse and was rummaging around inside it. Along with the lipstick, car keys, iPod, and makeup cases, he noticed a couple of joints wrapped in plastic and a ribbon of colored condoms that made a crackling sound when she pushed them around.

He looked away. “So, are you in college now?”

“No,” she said. “I took a year off.” She smiled at him. “My grades weren’t too good. Having too much fun.” She pulled out a small plastic bottle of orange juice. “Do you have any vodka?”

“Not on me,” he said, surprised.

“Gin?”

“Uh, no…”

“But you could get some, right?” She smiled at him.

“I suppose I could,” he said.

“I promise I’d pay you back,” she said, still smiling.

That was how it started.

They left the playing field separately, several minutes apart. Bradley went first, and he waited in his car in the parking lot, watching her walk toward him. She was wearing flip-flops, a short skirt, and a lacy top that looked like something you would wear to bed. But all the girls dressed that way these days. Her huge bag banged against her side as she walked. She lit a cigarette and then climbed into her car. She was driving a black Mustang. She waved to him.

He started his engine, pulled out, and she followed him.

He thought,Don’t get your hopes up. But the truth was, he already had.

CH019

Marilee Hunter, the pedantic director of the Long Beach Memorial genetics lab, liked to hear herself talk. Marty Roberts did his best to appear interested. Marilee had a fussy, pinched demeanor, like a librarian in an old forties movie. She delighted in catching errors among hospital staff. She had called Marty to say she needed to see him, right away.

“Correct me if I’m wrong on the basics,” Marliee Hunter said. “Mr. Weller’s daughter obtains a postmortem paternity test that indicates she and her father do not share DNA. Nevertheless, the widow insists Weller is the father, and demands further testing. You provide me samples of blood, spleen, liver, kidney, and testes, although all have been compromised from funeral home infusation. You are looking for a chimera, obviously.”

“Yes. Or an error in the original test,” Marty said. “We don’t know where the daughter took the blood for testing.”

“Paternity tests have a nontrivial error rate,” Marilee said. “Especially in online establishments.

My lab does not make errors. We will test all these tissues, Marty—as soon as you provide buccal cells from the daughter.”

“Right, right.” He had forgotten all about that. They needed cheek cells from the daughter to compare DNA. “She may not cooperate.”

“In that case,” Marilee said, “we will test the son and the other daughter. But you realize these tissue tests take time. Weeks.”

“Of course, yes.”

Marilee opened the Weller patient file, which was stamped DECEASED . She thumbed through the pages. “Meanwhile, I can’t help but wonder about your original autopsy.”

Marty jerked his head up. “What about it?”

“It shows here you ran a tox screen that came back negative.”

“We do a tox screen in every automobile fatality. It’s routine.”

“Umm,” Hunter said, pursing her lips. “The thing is, we repeated the tox screen in our lab. And the result is not negative.”

“Oh?” he said, controlling his voice. Thinking: What the fuck?

“It’s difficult to run a tox panel after all the funeral preservatives have been infused, but we have experience dealing with that. And we determined that the deceased Mr. Weller had elevated intracellular levels of calcium and magnesium…”

Marty thought, Oh boy …

“…along with significant hepatic elevation of ethanol dehydrogenase, implying a high blood-alcohol level at the time of the accident…”

Marty groaned inwardly. Who had done the original tox screen? Had fucking Raza sent it out?

Or onlysaid that he had?

“…and finally,” Marilee said, “we found trace levels of ethacrynic acid.”

“Ethacrynic acid?” Marty was shaking his head. “That makes no sense at all. That’s an oral diuretic.”

“Correct.”

“The guy was forty-six years old. His injuries were severe, but even so, I could tell he had been in fantastic physical shape—like he was a bodybuilder or something. Bodybuilders take those drugs. If he was taking an oral diuretic, that was probably why.”

“You’re assuming that he knew he was taking it,” Hunter said. “Possibly he didn’t know.”

“You think somebody poisoned him?” Marty said.

She shrugged. “Toxic reactions include shock, hypotension, and coma. It could have contributed to his death.”

“I don’t know how you would determine that.”

“You did the post,” she reminded him, thumbing through the chart.

“Yes, I did. Weller’s injuries were massive. Crush trauma to face and chest, pericardial rupture, fracture of hip and femur. His air bag didn’t open.”

“The car was checked, of course?”

Marty sighed. “Ask the cops. Not my job.”

“It should have been checked.”

“Look,” Marty said, “this was a single-car fatality. There were witnesses. The guy is not drunk or in a coma. He drives straight into a freeway overpass at ninety miles an hour. Nearly all single-car fatalities are suicides. No surprise the victim turned off the air bag first.”

“But you didn’t check, Marty.”

“No. Because we had no reason. The guy’s tox screen was negative and his electrolytes were essentially normal, given his injuries and time of death.”

“Except they weren’t normal, Marty.”

“Our tests came back normal.”

“Umm,” she said. “Are you sure the tests were actually done?”

And that was when Marty Roberts began to think seriously about Raza. Raza had said there was a rush order from the bone bank that night. Raza wanted to fill the order. So Raza would not have wanted Weller’s body to lie in a locker for four or six days while the abnormal tox findings were analyzed.

“I’ll have to check,” Marty said, “to make sure the tests were done.”

“I think we ought to,” Marilee said. “Because according to the hospital file, the deceased’s son works for a biotech company, and the wife works in a pediatrician’s office. I assume both have access to biologicals. At this point, we can’t be certain that Mr. Weller wasn’t poisoned.”

“Possible,” Marty said. “Though unlikely.”

She gave him a frosty look.

“I’ll get right on it,” Marty Roberts said.

Walking back to the lab, he tried to decide what to do about Raza. The guy was a menace. Marty was certain now that Raza had never ordered the tox screen, which meant that the lab report had been faked. Either Raza had faked it himself, Xeroxing another report and changing the name, or he had an accomplice in the lab who faked it for him. Probably the latter. Dear God, another person involved in all this.

And now Miss Prissypants was on the hunt for wrongdoers because of trace ethacrynic acid.

Ethacrynic acid. If John Weller really had been poisoned, Marty had to admit it was a clever choice. The guy was clearly vain about his body. At his age, he had to spend a couple of hours a day in the gym. Probably took a ton of supplements and shit. So it would be hard to prove that he hadn’t taken the diuretic himself.

Hard. But not impossible…Ethacrynic acid was a prescription drug. There would be paper trails.

Even if he got it from somebody, another bodybuilder, or a web site in Australia, all that would take days to check out. It wouldn’t be long before somebody decided to take another look at the body and discovered the corpse had no arm and leg bones.

Shit.

Fucking Raza!

Marty started thinking about a forty-six-year-old bodybuilder. Guy that age, grown family—

works his ass off to get a body like that, there’s only two reasons. He’s gay or he’s got a girlfriend. Either way he’s not humping his wife. So how does she feel about that? Pissed off?

Probably, yeah. Enough to poison the buff hubby? Couldn’t rule it out. People killed their spouses for less. Marty found himself thinking hard about Mrs. Weller, recalling everything that had happened at the exhumation. He saw it in his mind: the tearful widow, leaning against her tall son, with the dutiful daughter standing beside, holding tissues for Mom. All very touching.

Except…

The minute the casket came out of the ground, Emily Weller got nervous. Suddenly the grieving widow wanted everything done fast. Don’t take the body back to the hospital. Don’t take too many tissue samples. The woman who had demanded a thorough DNA analysis suddenly seemed to change her mind.

Why, he wondered, had she done that?

He could think of only one possible answer: Mrs. Weller wanted her paternity test, but she never imagined the body would be taken back to the hospital for examination. She never thought they would take tissues from multiple organs. She thought they would just grab a blood sample, put the body back in the ground, and go home.

Anything more than that seemed to make Mrs. Weller nervous.

Maybe there was hope, after all.

He went into his office and closed the door. He needed to call Mrs. Weller. It was a delicate call.

There would be a hospital record of the date and time of the call. So, why was he calling her? He frowned.

Oh, yes: Because he had to collect her DNA, and that of her children.

Okay, fine. But why hadn’t he collected the DNA from the family at the grave site? It was just a matter of cheek swabs. It would have taken only a moment.

Answer: Because he thought the DNA had already been collected by Miss Prissypants’s lab.

Marty considered that. Rolled it over in his mind.

He could find nothing wrong with it. He had a perfectly good reason to call.

He picked up the phone and dialed.

“Mrs. Weller, this is Dr. Roberts at Memorial Hospital. Marty Roberts.”

“Yes, Dr. Roberts.” A pause. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, Mrs. Weller. I just want to schedule you and your children to come in and give us blood and cheek tissue samples. For the DNA test.”

“We already did that. For that woman at the lab.”

“Oh, I see. You mean Dr. Hunter? I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

There was a pause. Emily said, “Are you, uh, doing the tests on Jack now?”

“Yes. We do some of the tests here, and the lab does some.”

“Have you found anything yet? I mean, are you finding what you expected?”

Marty smiled as he listened. She wasn’t asking about paternity. She was worried about something else they might find. “Well actually, Mrs. Weller…”

“Yes?”

“There does seem to be a slight complication. Nothing important.”

“What kind of a complication?”

“The genetics lab found traces of an unusual chemical in Mr. Weller’s tissues. It’s probably a lab error, contamination.”

“What kind of a chemical?”

“I only mention it because I know you wanted your husband to have his final rest as soon as possible.”

“That’s right. I want him left undisturbed,” she said.

“Of course. I would hate to see his final rest delayed for days, or even weeks,” Marty said,

“while questions were asked about this chemical and how it came to be found in his body.

Because even if it is a lab error, everything from this point on is required as a matter of law, Mrs.

Weller. I shouldn’t even be making this call to you. But I…I guess I feel responsible. As I say, I’d hate to see your husband’s final rest delayed for something like a coroner’s inquest.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Of course I would never advise you to do anything but follow the law, Mrs. Weller. But I sensed that disinterment of your husband was an emotionally exhausting experience for you…”

“Yes…yes…”

“And if you didn’t want the further emotional exhaustion of reinterment—to say nothing of the expense—you might elect a less emotional solution. And less expensive, if you were short of funds…You have the right to order the body cremated.”