Redheads (11 page)

“Yes.”

She sipped her whiskey and pointed down the beach towards the old Flagship Hotel on its pier out over the water.

“We stayed there, mostly. Dad said it was the nicest hotel in Galveston when he was a kid, but by the time we stayed, it was run down. I guess you have nicer beaches in Hawaii.”

“That’s why we went.”

“Straight out of school?”

“Cheryl was. I graduated three years before her, so I took the bar in California, worked in San Francisco and waited for her to graduate. She did her residency in Honolulu, and we stayed.”

They didn’t speak for a few moments. She sipped from her drink and wondered how far she could hurl the heavy glass tumbler from the balcony. If she hit the windshield of a parked car, what would happen?

“I’ve got to meet that Spaulding guy, the district attorney, tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to.”

She sat on one of the deck chairs. The lights from the oil tankers were reeling on a moving horizon. She steadied herself against the armrest.

“How many of those’ve you had?”

“This?” She held up the glass. “My fifth.
 
I was down at the bar earlier.”

She hadn’t felt drunk at all until that moment, and then she felt it all at once. She finished her whiskey and set the empty glass on the balcony next to her.

“It’s not my drink. Scotch, I mean. It’s Allison’s—she did a post-doc year in Edinburgh and came back a Scotch convert.”

Chris sat on the balcony next to her chair. He leaned against the glass wall and put his feet out towards the stone railing. He didn’t say anything, and she liked him for that. They sat listening to the wind blow off the Gulf. A dark band of clouds lay on the horizon. She could smell the rain in the wind.

“I wish you’d come with me to this thing tomorrow, the meeting with Spaulding.”

“I don’t know what I could do.”

“Just be there. As a friend.”

“All right.”

They sat awhile. The clouds on the horizon were blotting out higher stars as they mounted up and moved closer. Julissa saw the first flashes of lightning, veiled in the thickness of the approaching front.

“I might go to bed soon,” Chris said. He had finished his drink and held both of their empty glasses cupped in the palm of one hand resting on his lap.

“You think he’s still in Galveston, this man?”

Chris thought about it for a moment.

“No. I doubt it.”

“I hope not. I want to find him but I don’t want him in this city right now.”

“It’s hard,” Chris said. “Not knowing, I mean.”

The wind was picking up. A few seagulls perched on the roof above them flew off and flared briefly in the white lights that edged the eaves before disappearing over Seawall Boulevard.

“Will you stay a bit and watch the storm come in with me?” she asked.

“Okay.”

“We can go in when the rain starts.”

He nodded.

Later, Julissa was in her room listening to the rain beat on the window and sweep against the walls of the old hotel as the wind rushed past. The lightning lit the room and then left her in a greater darkness waiting for the next flash. She imagined a swimmer, deep in the heart of the storm and far out in the Gulf, plowing headlong into the rain and breaking seas, fast as a runner, the waves showing green and steep in the flashes, great schools of hammerhead sharks parting like curtains to let the swimmer pass untouched. She pulled the blankets closer and eventually slept with the lights on and her gun on the bedspread next to her.

Chapter Twelve

Chris waited his turn to disembark from the 767 that had just landed in Boston. He walked up the jetway with his briefcase and followed the signs to the baggage claim. The fork from Allison’s apartment was so valuable he hadn’t risked its confiscation by trying to bring it through security in his carry-on. When his suitcase came along the conveyor belt, he pulled it to a quiet place beside a broken vending machine, knelt, and checked that the fork was still in its evidence bag. Then he zipped the suitcase and went to the rental car kiosks.

Though he’d hesitate admitting it outright to his new friends, Chris was rich.

He and Cheryl made a lot of money while she was alive and they were both working. But the heavy money came after she was murdered. As a surgeon at the beginning of a long and promising career, Cheryl had been very well insured. It was enough that Chris didn’t need to worry, but more money came ten months later. Their house had been in a new gated development on the edge of Kaneohe Bay. The developer’s brochures advertised it as a safe place to raise a family. A wrought iron fence surrounded the neighborhood, with guard booths at the entrance drive and guards at the walkway gates leading to the beach. Security cameras watched the common areas; each house was equipped with an alarm wired to the front guard booth. On the day Cheryl was murdered, the guard at the beach gates called in sick and the private security company never bothered to find a replacement. The guard at the entrance drive booth was asleep. To make sure no one saw him sleeping, he raised the gate to let all traffic pass, and he turned off the camera recorders so there would be no DVD from the guard booth camera showing him asleep. It may not have made a difference. The police later discovered the alarm in Chris’s house was improperly installed and couldn’t send a signal anywhere.

Chris had not been a tort lawyer. He never thought a lawsuit would fix anything. But when he learned how thoroughly Cheryl had been failed, he sued the security company, the developer, and for good measure, his homeowners’ association. The developer had an eight million dollar insurance policy; the security company had three; and the homeowners’ association had two and a half. The developer brought in its electrical subcontractor as a third party defendant; the sub was insured to the hilt. Chris negotiated a global settlement for ten million dollars, made the four defendants pay to raze his house, and got the homeowners’ association to buy the vacant lot. His only concession was to sign a confidentiality agreement. He could live easily enough on what they’d saved before Cheryl was killed, and on the money from her life insurance. The rest was for revenge.

He was in Boston to spend some of that.

He drove his rental car into the city and left it with the valet at the Marriott Hotel near the waterfront. The sun was going down. He’d left from Houston shortly after returning to the Galvez with Julissa after her meeting with the prosecutor. She’d come out quietly, carrying Allison’s autopsy report in a folder. She hadn’t said much on the drive back to the hotel.

Now, standing in the room at the Marriott and looking out over Boston’s harbor, he thought about calling her. To say what, precisely? He wasn’t sure. He told himself it was because he’d gone so long with no friends. Now that he had some, he wanted them. But he knew a lie when he told it to himself. It was Julissa he wanted to call, not Aaron Westfield. He put the idea out of his mind and watched the sun go down. Then he showered, changed into slacks and a white shirt, and went downstairs.

The scientist’s name was Dr. Gerard Chevalier. They met at the bar off the lobby. Chris had spoken to Dr. Chevalier on the telephone twice and had corresponded with him by email. He recognized the scientist from his picture on the company’s web page. He was short and square-looking, in his mid-fifties with salt-and-pepper hair just above his shoulders. He wore golden spectacles and a dark suit. According to the web page, verified by Mike Nakamura, Chevalier held an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He started Intelligene in 2004 after patenting a process for sequencing DNA.

Chris had been completely frank with him on the phone. Chevalier was willing to do business.

“Dr. Chevalier?”

“Yes.”

“Chris Wilcox.”

They shook hands and took a booth away from the other groups of people. A waitress followed them, and Chris waited until they’d ordered drinks and she’d left.

“How’s Intelligene?”

“Good. We were profiled in the
New York Times
two months ago, business has been up since then.”

“You own the company?”

“Technically, no. I started it. But we went public last year, so the investors are the owners.”

“You’re still the CEO?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve got some freedom of action?”

Dr. Chevalier nodded. “I haven’t forgotten our talk.”

“Good.”

“You found something? Evidence?”

Chris nodded. He opened his briefcase. Inside was a cardboard tube, the kind used for mailing photographs. Inside of that, in a wax paper evidence bag, was the fork he’d taken from Allison’s kitchen counter.

Chris handed it across the table to Chevalier.

“Don’t open it here.”

“Understood. It’s good you used the wax paper and not plastic.”

“Like you told me,” Chris said. He pointed at the bag. “You’ll probably see two DNA sources. One’s a woman, and you’ll find more of her than the other. I’m looking for a man. The source for the man will be saliva, if there’s any trace of him on this at all. The blood and other matter is from the victim.”

Dr. Chevalier put the tube in the lapel pocket of his suit coat.

“You got this how?”

“You know my situation.”

Dr. Chevalier nodded.

“You’re uncomfortable, I can take it somewhere else.”

Dr. Chevalier shook his head. “I just want to know where I stand.”

“The fee?”

“Standard full sequence rate.” Chevalier opened his own briefcase and slid a sheet of paper across the table.

“This is the escrow information. They disburse half right away, as a deposit. We’ll give you the initial data as it comes in. When we give the full report to escrow, they disburse the other half.”

“If you can’t find any usable DNA from the male source?”

“Then I’ll refund the deposit.”

“Thanks.”

The waitress came back with their drinks. Chris had a light beer and Dr. Chevalier had ordered a glass of pinot noir.

When she left, Chevalier took another set of documents from his briefcase.

“It’s a violation of federal law to sequence a person’s full genome without his consent. If you sign this waiver for me to sequence your own DNA on the sample you just gave me, then I won’t have a problem.”

Chris looked at the waiver and looked back at Chevalier. He hadn’t considered signing anything that would link him to the evidence from Allison’s apartment.

“It’s all right,” Chevalier said. “The simplest test would show you aren’t the source of any DNA in the sample you gave me. Am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“This way, I do the work after hours, but handle the fee through the books like a straight-up transaction. You get privacy, I stay clear with my shareholders.”

Chris signed the waiver and pushed it back. Chevalier was right: if the waiver wound up with the Galveston police, it might help convict him of breaking and entering, or tampering with a crime scene. But not murder.

“How long for the full report?”

“A week and a half, assuming I find the right DNA.” Dr. Chevalier raised his glass. “To a step forward, Mr. Wilcox.”

They toasted and sipped their drinks. Dr. Chevalier held his wineglass up, between the dim overhead light and his eye. He swirled the wine in his glass and took another sip.

“I had some time to think about this after our last call.”

“Yeah?”

“There are other tests I could do. Or contract out. If we can isolate a saliva sample, we can try running it through a mass spectrometer.”

“What’ll that do?”

“I read a paper a few months ago on stable isotope hydrology. Heard of it?”

“No.”

“Basically, all ground water has a unique signature of stable isotopes. A person who lives in a place long enough builds these up in his body just by drinking the local water. Researchers put together stable isotope hydrology maps of the world.”

“It works?”

“Last year, some archaeologists in London found an ancient grave. They did a spectrographic analysis of the victims’ teeth and proved the skeletons were Vikings. No other artifacts in the grave, just the bones. These guys were herded naked to the edge of the pit. Then beheaded.”

“Without that, the stable isotope whatnot, would there’ve been a way to tell they weren’t English?”

“Assuming there was enough preserved DNA, maybe. But preservation of DNA in a bone over ten centuries isn’t very likely. And there’s been genetic intermixing between the English and the Scandinavians—even back then. Stable isotope hydrology can give proof of where someone actually lived, not where his ancestors came from.”

Chris thought about it. Even if the chances of it working were one in a hundred, he thought it might be worthwhile. He imagined how much easier it would be if they could limit their search area to the cities served by one aquifer.

“I won’t get my hopes up, but give it a try. Assuming you isolate anything that’s his and not hers.”