“Mom?”
“Yes, Josh.”
“I need your help.”
“Of course, dear. Anything.”
“I need you to do something for me and not to talk about it to anyone, ever.”
“Well, that’s difficult—”
“Yes or no, Mom.”
“Well, all right, dear.”
“You said that Lois Graham’s son is on smack, and dropped out of college?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he now?”
“Apparently,” she said, “he’s downtown in some godawful flophouse off campus—”
“Do you know where?”
“No, but Lois went to see him. She told me it was squalid. It’s on East Thirty-eighth, some old frame house with faded blue shutters. Eight or nine addicts are there sleeping on the floor, but I can call Lois and ask her—”
“No,” he said quickly. “Don’t do anything, Mom.”
“But you said you needed my help—”
“That’s for later, Mom. For now, everything is fine. I’ll call you in a day or so.”
He scribbled on a pad:
Eric Graham
E 38th Street
Frame hse blue shutters
He reached for his car keys.
Rachel Allen,who worked in the dispensary, said, “You still haven’t signed back in one oxygen canister from two weeks ago, Josh. Or the virus vial that was with it.” The company measured remaining virus in returned vials, as a way of keeping a rough track of dosages to the rats.
“Yes,” he said, “I know, uh, I keep forgetting.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s in my car.”
“In your car? Josh, that’s a contagious retrovirus.”
“Yeah, for mice.”
“Even so. It must remain in a negative-pressure laboratory environment at all times.” Rachel was a stickler for the rules. Nobody really paid attention to her.
“I know, Rach,” he said, “but I had a family emergency. I had to get my brother”—he dropped his voice—“out of jail.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
He hesitated. “Armed robbery.”
“Really.”
“Liquor store. Mom is crushed. Anyway, I’ll bring the canister back to you. Meanwhile, can I have one more?”
“We only sign out one at a time.”
“I need one more now. Please? I’m under a lot of pressure.”
Light rainwas falling. The streets were slick with oil and shimmered in rainbow patterns. Beneath low, angry clouds, he drove down East Thirty-eighth Street. It was an old section of town, bypassed by modern rebuilding farther north. Here houses built in the 1920s and 1930s were still standing. Josh drove past several wood-frame houses, in various states of disrepair. One had a blue door. None had blue shutters.
He ended up in the warehouse district, the street lined with loading docks. He turned around and headed back. He drove as slowly as he could, and finally he saw the house. It was not actually on Thirty-eighth but on the corner of Thirty-eighth and Alameda, tucked back behind high weeds and ratty bushes. An old mattress streaked with rust lay on the sidewalk in front of the house. There was a truck tire on the front lawn. A battered VW bus was pulled up to the curb.
Josh parked across the street. He watched the house. And waited.
CH013
The coffinrose into sunlight. It looked the same as it had when buried a week earlier, except for the clumps of dirt that dropped from the underside.
“This is all so undignified,” Emily Weller said. She stood stiffly at the graveside, accompanied by her son, Tom, and her daughter Rachel. Of course, Lisa was not there. She was thecause of all this, but she could not be bothered to see what she had done to her poor father.
The coffin swung slowly in the air as the graveside workers guided it to the far side of the pit under the direction of the hospital pathologist, a nervous little man named Marty Roberts. He should be nervous, Emily thought, if he was the one who had given the blood to Lisa without anybody’s permission.
“What happens now?” Emily said, turning to her son. Tom was twenty-six, dressed in a sharp suit and tie. He had a master’s degree in microbiology and worked for a big biotech company in Los Angeles. Tom had turned out good, as had her daughter Rachel. Rachel was a senior at USC, studying business administration. “Will they take Jack’s blood here?”
“Oh, they’ll take more than blood,” Tom said.
Emily said, “What do you mean?”
“You see,” Tom said, “for a genetic test like this, where there is a dispute, they ordinarily take tissues from several organ systems.”
“I didn’t realize,” Emily said, frowning. She felt her heart pounding, thumping in her chest. She hated that feeling. Soon there was a squeezing feeling in her throat. It was painful. She bit her lip.
“You all right, Mom?”
“I should have taken my anxiety pills.”
Rachel said, “Will this take long?”
“No,” Tom said, “it should be only a few minutes. The pathologist will open the casket, to confirm the identity of the body. Then he’ll take it back to the hospital to remove the tissues for genetic analysis. He’ll return the body for reburial tomorrow or the next day.”
“Tomorrow or the next day?” Emily said. She sniffled, wiped her eyes. “You mean we have to come back here? We have to bury Jack again? This is all so…so…”
“I know, Mom.” He patted her arm. “I’m sorry. But there is no other way. You see, they have to check for something called a chimera—”
“Oh, don’t tell me,” she said, waving her hand. “I won’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Okay, Mom.” He put his arm around her shoulder.
In ancient mythology,chimeras were monsters composed of different animal parts. The original Chimera had the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and a serpent’s tail. Some chimeras were part human, like the Egyptian Sphinx, with the body of a lion, the wings of a bird, and the head of a woman.
But true human chimeras—meaning people with two sets of DNA—had been discovered only recently. A woman needing a kidney transplant had tested her own children as possible donors, only to discover that they did not share her DNA. She was told the children weren’t hers, and was asked to prove she had actually given birth to them. A lawsuit ensued. After considerable study, doctors realized that her body contained two different strands of DNA. In her ovaries, they found eggs with two kinds of DNA. The skin cells of her abdomen had her children’s DNA. The skin of her shoulders did not. She was a mosaic. In every organ of her body.
It turned out that the woman had originally been one of a pair of fraternal twins, but early in development, her sister’s embryo had fused with hers. So she was now literally herself and her own twin.
More than fifty chimeras had since been reported. Scientists now suspected that chimerism was not as rare as they had once thought. Certainly, whenever there was a difficult question of paternity, chimerism had to be considered. It was possible that Lisa’s father might be a chimera. But to determine that, they would need tissues from every organ of his body, and preferably from several different places on each organ.
That was why Dr. Roberts was required to take so many tissue samples, and why it would have to be done at the hospital, not at the grave site.
Dr. Roberts raisedthe lid and turned to the family on the opposite side of the grave. “Would one of you make the identification, please?”
“I will,” Tom said. He walked around the grave and looked into the coffin. His father appeared surprisingly unchanged, except the skin was much grayer, a dark gray now, and the limbs seemed to have shrunk, to have lost mass, especially the legs inside the trousers.
In a formal voice, the pathologist said, “Is this your father, John J. Weller?”
“Yes. He is, yes.”
“All right. Thank you.”
&
nbsp; Tom said, “Dr. Roberts, I know you have your procedures, but…if there is any way you can take the tissues here…so my mother doesn’t have to go through another day and another burial…”
“I’m sorry,” Marty Roberts said. “My actions are governed by state law. We’re required to take the body to the hospital for examination.”
“If you could…just this once…bend…”
“I’m sorry. I wish I could.”
Tom nodded and walked back to his mother and sister.
His mother said, “What was all that about?”
“Just asking a question.”
Tom looked back and saw that Dr. Roberts was now bent over, his body half inside the casket. Abruptly the pathologist rose up. He walked over to speak in Tom’s ear, so no one else could hear. “Mr. Weller, perhaps we should spare your family’s feelings. If we can keep this between us…”
“Of course. Then you’ll…?”
“Yes, we’ll do everything here. It should take only a few moments. Let me get my kit.” He hurried off to a nearby SUV.
Emily bit her lip. “What’s he doing?”
“I asked him to do all the tests here, Mom.”
“And he said yes? Thank you, dear,” she said, and kissed her son. “Will he do all the tests that he would do at the hospital?”
“No, but it should be enough to answer your questions.”
Twenty minutes later, the tissue samples had been taken and placed in a series of glass tubes. The tubes were placed in slots in a metal refrigeration case. The casket was returned to the grave, disappearing into shadow.
“Come on,” Emily Weller said to her children, “let’s get out of here. I need a damn drink.”
As they drove away, she said to Tom, “I’m sorry you had to do that. Was Jack’s poor body very decayed, dear?”
“No,” Tom said. “Not much, no.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Emily said. “That’s very good.”
CH014
Marty Robertswas sweating by the time he got back to Long Beach Memorial Hospital. Because of what he had done at the cemetery, he could lose his license, no problem. One of those gravediggers could pick up the phone and call the county. The county could wonder why Marty had broken protocol, especially with a lawsuit pending. When you take tissues in the field, you risk contamination. Everybody knew that. So the county might start wondering why Marty Roberts would risk that. And before long, they might be wondering…
Shit. Shit, shit,shit!
He pulled into the emergency parking, next to the ambulances, and hurried down the basement hallway to Pathology. It was lunchtime; almost nobody was there. The rows of stainless steel tables stood empty.
Raza was washing up.
“You dumb fuck,” Marty said, “are youtrying to get us both in jail?”
Raza turned slowly. “What is the problem?” he said quietly.
“The problem,” Marty said, “is that I told you, take the bones only on thecremations. Not the burials. Thecremations. Is that so fucking hard to understand?”
“Yeah, well. That’s what I do,” Raza said.
“No, that’snot what you do. Because I just came from an exhumation, and you know what I saw when I dug the guy up? Very fucking skinny legs, Raza. Very skinny arms. In aburial. ”
“No,” Raza said, “that’s not what I do.”
“Well,somebody took the bones.”
Raza headed to the office. “What’s the name of this guy?”
“Weller.”
“What, that guy again? He’s the guy we lost the tissues for, right?”
“Right. So the family exhumed him. Because he wasburied. ”
Raza leaned over the desk, keyed in the patient name. He stared at the screen. “Oh yeah. You’re right. It was a burial. But I didn’t do that one.”
Marty said, “You didn’t do that one? Who the fuck did?”
Raza shrugged. “My brother came in, that’s all. I had an appointment that night.”
“Your brother? What brother? Nobody else is supposed to be—”
“Don’t sweat it, Marty,” Raza said. “My brother comes in from time to time. He knows what to do. He works at Hilldale Mortuary.”
Marty wiped sweat from his forehead. “Jesus. How long has this been going on?”
“Maybe a year.”
“A year!”
“Only at night, Marty. Late night only. He wears my lab coat, looks like me…We look the same.”
“Wait a minute,” Marty said. “Who gave that girl the blood sample? That girl Lisa Weller.”
“Okay,” Raza said. “So sometimes he makes mistakes.”
“And sometimes he works afternoons?”
“Only Sundays, Marty. If I have appointments, is all.”
Marty gripped the edge of the desk to steady himself. He leaned over and breathed deeply. “Some fucking guy who doesn’t even work for the hospital gave unauthorized blood to a woman because she asked for it? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Not some fucking guy. My brother.”
“Jesus.”
“He said she was cute.”
“That explains everything.”
“Come on, Marty,” Raza said, in a soothing tone. “I’m sorry about the Weller guy, I really am, but anybody could have made the switch. Fucking cemetery could have dug him up and taken the long bones. Gravediggers working as independent contractors could have done it. You know it happens all over. They got those guys in Phoenix. And the ones in Minnesota. And now Brooklyn.”
“And they’re all in jail now, Raza.”
“Okay,” Raza said. “That’s true. The thing is, I told my brother to do it.”
“You did…”
“Yeah. That particular night, the Weller body came in, we had a stat call for bone, and the Weller guy typed right. So do we fill the order or what? Because you know those bone guys can take their business elsewhere. To them, now meansnow. Supply or die.”
Marty sighed. “Yeah, when they call stat, you should fill it.”
“Okay, then.”
Marty slid into the chair and began typing at the keyboard himself. “However,” he said, “if you extracted those long bones eight days ago, I don’t see any payment transfer to me.”
“Don’t worry. It’s coming.”
“The check is in the mail?”
“Hey, I forgot. You’ll get your taste.”
“Make sure of it,” Marty said. He turned to go. “And keep your fucking brother out of the hospital from now on. You understand me?”
“Sure, Marty. Sure.”
Marty Roberts wentoutside to move his car from the emergency space. He backed out and drove to the Doctors Only section of the parking garage. Then he sat in his car for a long time. Thinking about Raza.
You’ll get your taste.
It seemed that Raza was starting to believe that this was his program, and that Marty Roberts worked for him. Raza was handing out the payments. Raza was deciding who should come in to help. Raza was not behaving like an employee; he was starting to behave like he was in charge, and that was dangerous for all sorts of reasons.
Marty had to do something about it.
And he had to do it soon.
Or losing his medical license would be the least of his problems.
CH015
At sunset,the titanium cube that housed BioGen Research shimmered with a blinding red glare, and bathed the adjacent parking lot in a dark orange color. As president Rick Diehl stepped out of the building, he paused to put on his sunglasses, then walked toward his brand-new silver Porsche Carrera SC. He loved this car, which he had bought the week before in celebration of his impending divorce—
“Fuck!”
He couldn’t believe his eyes.
“Fuck! Fuck!Fuck! ”
His parking spot was empty. The car was gone.
That bitch!
He didn’t know how she had done it, but he was sure she had taken his car. Probably got her boyfriend to ar
range it. After all, the new boyfriendwas a car dealer. Moving up from a tennis pro. Bitch!