“Well, he ain’t gonna find me there.”
Only because you’ve been locked up the whole time it was being compiled, Julia thought. If you’d been out there…
“Of course not,” Aaron said. “We know that, and you know that, and now he knows that. But it was a good thought on his part. Imagine the leverage he would have had on you if he found a match to someone with a sex offense conviction. Or better yet, a match to an unsolved crime.”
Jeremy glared at him. “‘Better yet’?”
Aaron shrank half an inch deeper into his chair. “I meant for him.”
Julia wondered about that. Aaron had seemed to be warming to the subject of Jeremy taking a fall for a sex offense.
Julia said, “What does he say he found in your DNA?”
Again that cagey look. “Just a bunch of personal junk that don’t mean nothin.”
Julia kept her tone as level and soothing as possible. “Then why are you so upset?”
“Because I want to know where he’s getting this information. And where’s he getting my DN-fuckin-A?”
Aaron said, “Many commercial labs do DNA analysis. And as for obtaining a sample, all this detective would need was some of your hair or blood or saliva.”
Jeremy shook his head. “I ain’t had a haircut or cut myself recently and I never developed the spittin habit.” His mouth twisted. “When you’re inside and you spit, you’re spittin where you live.”
Julia had noted a thickening of his redneck accent during the course of the conversation. Over the years she’d noted that it usually occurred when he was upset. She’d come to see it as an unconscious affectation to put people off guard, make them underestimate him.
She said, “He could get saliva from an envelope or a fork or a spoon.”
Jeremy looked at the floor and shook his head. “Shit. That means someone’s been followin me and I ain’t had a clue.” When he looked up again his expression was fierce. “Where can I find this sonuvabitch?”
Julia glanced at Aaron and found him looking at her.
“We don’t know,” she said.
Fury blazed in Jeremy’s eyes as he took a step toward her.
“Bullshit!”
It was all Julia could do not to flinch. But she held his burning gaze as she blurted a reply.
“It’s true. He calls himself John Robertson, says he’s a licensed private eye, but the man who holds the license is dead.”
“You ain’t gonna tell me he’s a ghost, are you?”
“No, just someone who’s very good at hiding his tracks.” She thought about that. “I guess in a way he is a ghost.”
Jeremy’s expression became frustrated. “Well, what about this agency you’re always threatening me with? Can’t you sic them on this guy?”
“There’s nothing I’d like better, but we’ve got nothing to go on. He wears gloves, so we have no fingerprints. The plates on his car are not registered to anyone. The only thing I might be able to give them is his physical description, but that’s no help. He looks like a million other men his age.”
“And what age is that?”
“Yours, I’d say. Average height, brown hair, brown eyes. No distinguishing features. Very average looking, wouldn’t you agree, Aaron?” She looked to him for support and found him staring at her with a shocked expression. “What?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
What was eating him?
“What about his face?” Jeremy said. “Big nose, little nose? Fat lips, thin lips? Scar? Anything?”
Julia shook her head. “Nothing. An eminently forgettable face.”
“Fuck! And you have no idea where I can find him?”
Julia looked at him. Jeremy had unsettled her. Time for a little payback.
“Somewhere in your general vicinity, I imagine. Not now, not here, but sometime during the course of the rest of the day I would suspect he’ll be watching you.”
The flash of uncertainty in Jeremy’s eyes was gratifying, but didn’t last nearly long enough.
“Well, now that I know he’s watchin, I’ll catch him at it. And when I do…”
Julia pointed at him. “Don’t do anything foolish. If you think you’ve spotted him, keep your distance. Call me instead. Anytime day or night—call me and I’ll have him taken care of.”
“I can handle this myself.”
“I’m sure you can, but you mustn’t. You were able to get off easy with that barroom fight. But if you assault this man, you’ll be locked up again and we’ll have to cancel the clinical trial. And then where will you be? Be sensible, Jeremy. If you spot him, you make the call, and that’s all. Understand?”
He nodded. “Oh, yeah. I understand.”
Julia wondered if he did. Only time would tell.
Without another word he walked out, leaving the door open behind him.
Julia turned to Aaron and found him staring at her again with that shocked look. One of her mother’s favorite expressions came back to her.
“Close your mouth, Aaron. You’re catching flies.”
“I don’t believe you did that.”
“Did what?”
“Gave him Robertson’s description. You might as well have served him up as a sacrificial lamb.”
Julia shook her head. What an old woman.
“Think of it as a provocative stimulus. How can we know whether or not the suppresser therapy is working if we don’t challenge it?”
“You did the same with Gerhard, and now you’re condemning Robertson to the same fate.”
“Not necessarily. If the higher dose of suppresser therapy is working, Jeremy will call in and we’ll handle Robertson.”
“And if it’s not working, Robertson could wind up dead.”
Julia had had just about enough of this.
“And if he does, so what?” She remembered his crack about her underwear. The bastard. “He’s been playing us for fools, Aaron. He’s not supposed to be anywhere near Jeremy, so if he’s caught snooping around, it’s on his head, not ours. Besides, I see it as a win-win situation.”
“Not for Robertson.”
“No, for us. If Jeremy removes Robertson, not only will we have him off our backs, but we’ll also have an indication that we need to up the dose of two-eighty-seven.”
“But what if he’s clumsy about it and gets caught?”
“We’ll clean things up before he gets caught—just like last time.”
“Last time we were lucky.”
“We must provoke him, Aaron. And think about it: If he calls in instead of attacking, not only will we know the suppresser is working, we’ll have an idea of the proper milligram-per-kilogram dose. I don’t see a downside.”
“Unless you’re Robertson.”
“Why do you care about that lying swindler?”
“He’s a fellow human being. Isn’t what we’re doing here supposed to make the world a safer place for our fellow human beings?”
Julia sighed. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
But not that particular human being.
3
Jeremy’s brain blazed as he spun the Miata’s tires on the way out of the Creighton front gate and headed back to the city. He checked his rearview mirror to see if anyone pulled into the lane behind him, and scanned the road ahead for cars parked on the shoulders.
Someone had been following him around, picking up little souvenirs here and there and using them to test his DNA.
Shit!
Worst part was he hadn’t had a clue.
He checked around again. He had the road to himself. But what did that mean? This Robertson guy could be waiting down near the Thruway, knowing he’d have to come that way to get back to Queens. The guy could pull in a few cars behind him as he got on and Jeremy would never know.
That hunted feeling…
Reminded him of his last free days in Atlanta. He’d thought he was in the clear, thought he’d covered his tracks. Everyone was looking for a religious nut, a wild-eyed
right-to-lifer, and Jeremy was anything but. But…
Yeah. Always the but.
But someone had seen someone near the second shooting and gave a description that shared certain features with someone else seen in a photo taken on the street shortly before the first shooting, and a sketch was circulated in a door-to-door canvas and finally a newsstand guy thought it looked like someone who came by regularly to buy cigarettes.
Like a jerk, he’d held on to the gun. Yeah, it was stupid, but with the feds all over the place he’d have no way to get his hands on another piece on the outside chance Moonglow decided to try yet another abortionist. One thing led to another and, when he felt the circle tightening, he decided he had to get rid of it. He was nabbed before he could.
And now someone else was trying to tighten a noose around him.
Maybe he shouldn’t go back to Queens—at least not yet. He needed to talk to fuckhead Hank about this gene-testing shit, and the sooner the better. Why not head for the city?
He pulled onto the shoulder and grabbed the map from the glove compartment. He’d learned his way around the Forest Hills area, but up here was still pretty much a mystery. He located Rathburg and noticed that if he headed east from here he could get on the Saw Mill Parkway. Going south on that would take him to 9A which led right down the west side of Manhattan.
Perfect.
He got rolling again and pulled out his cell phone. Time to call big brother. He’d try to find some excuse not to meet, but he wasn’t weaseling out today. This was too important.
4
Aaron pulled into the lot of the Argonaut, found a space, and parked. Instead of heading inside he sat with the motor idling. To tempt himself out of the car and into the diner, he conjured images of Belgian waffles dripping with syrup and topped with powdered sugar and strawberries and maybe even some whipped cream, but he felt too queasy to eat. So he sat and wrestled with the question that had been plaguing him all through the hours since the meeting in Julia’s office.
Should he tell Jack that Julia had given that pervert Bolton his description?
On one hand, he felt he owed it to him; after all, they’d been working together on putting Bolton back behind bars, but beyond that, he liked the man. He seemed a decent sort, as well as clever and resourceful.
On the other hand, they weren’t getting anywhere against Bolton. If Bolton pegged Jack as the detective who’d been causing him so much trouble, he might try to do him serious harm. Enough harm to get himself locked up, thereby aborting this whole outpatient fiasco.
Might try to do Jack harm…that was where the struggle came: the try. Bolton had a couple of inches and maybe twenty pounds on Jack, but Aaron had a feeling the man could take care of himself.
For all he knew, Jack might put Bolton in a hospital. Might pound the living shit out of that deviant, amoral bastard. God, wouldn’t that be wonderful? For not only would Bolton be suffering some well-deserved pain, but physical incapacitation might also prove enough to end the outpatient trial.
On the other hand, if Aaron warned Jack, he might back off on his surveillance, reducing or perhaps even eliminating the chance of a confrontation. Aaron dearly wanted to see Bolton hurt.
He jumped and squealed like a girl at the sound of a rap on the passenger window. He shrank against his door as he looked.
Jack.
Relief flooded him. If it had been Bolton, God knew what he would have done.
He hit the unlock switch and Jack slid into the passenger seat.
“Jumpy?”
Aaron nodded. “You could say that.”
“Thought I’d find you inside. Actually it’s better here. I don’t feel like eating.”
“Neither do I. Especially after seeing the DNA comparison between Dawn and Bolton.”
“You mean the father-daughter thing.”
Aaron gasped and stared at him. He’d said it so matter-of-factly.
“You know?”
A nod. “Since last night.”
“But how could you? And how can this be? How does something like this happen? How could her mother not know?”
He realized he was babbling, but the questions had been pounding against the inside of his skull since he’d seen the printout.
Ninety-nine point nine nine percent probability of paternity.
Aaron listened in horrified fascination as Jack told about how Moonglow Garber had been abducted and repeatedly raped for weeks until she was pregnant, then released. And then he saw it all.
“The abortionist assassinations! They finally make sense!”
Jack nodded. “Finally.”
“But that doesn’t explain how you know Bolton is Dawn’s father. Hank Thompson could have been the rapist.”
“That’s what I thought. Then I sketched out a timeline last night and realized that Hank was locked up in Creighton during the weeks Moonglow was missing.”
Aaron leaned back. “Dear God.”
He thought of Moonglow. That poor girl. Kidnapped, raped daily, probably in terror for her life. And then Bolton, father of her child…he thought of his own daughter and wanted to be sick. This only confirmed what he’d known all along: Bolton was a monster.
Jack’s fingers were knotted into fists. “The sick, sick, subhuman son of a bitch. How does anyone do that?”
For no good reason, Aaron said, “Do you have a daughter?”
Jack looked up at him and Aaron recoiled at what he saw in his eyes. He didn’t know what it was—pain, certainly, but nestled in a terrible seething darkness that urged him to flee and never look back.
“I almost did,” he said in a low, barely audible tone. “I sort of do.” He closed those terrifying eyes, took a breath, then opened them again. The darkness was gone. “You have a printout of the comparison with you?”
The abrupt change caught Aaron off guard. “Uh, um, yes. Why?”
“I want to see it.”
He pulled it out of his pocket and watched as Jack unfolded it, studied it, then looked up.
“Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent probability. Not much wiggle room there.”
Aaron shook his head. “Not a bit. But I don’t get it. If Moonglow’s child was to be later impregnated by one of her uncles, why not have Thompson do it? With a half uncle as the father, the chance of autosomal recessive traits coming to the fore are increased, but nowhere near what could happen to a baby whose father is not only its grandfather, but an uncle as well. It’s not only sick, it’s…counterproductive.”
“Refresh me on ‘autosomal recessive traits.’”
“An autosomal recessive gene is a genetic defect you inherit from one of your parents. For want of a better term, it’s half of a genetically mediated disease. Let’s say for example that you inherited a cystic fibrosis mutation from your mother. You don’t show signs of cystic fibrosis because your mutation is paired with a normal gene from your father that overrules the mutation. This makes you a carrier. Should you impregnate a woman without a similar mutation, there’s a fifty-fifty chance of the child being a carrier too, but zero chance it will wind up with cystic fibrosis. You following?”
Jack nodded. “Because there’s no chance of my mutation getting paired with another like it.”
“Correct. But should you impregnate a woman with a similar mutation, there’s still a fifty-fifty chance of producing a carrier, but also a one-in-four chance of producing a child with cystic fibrosis. This is why first-degree relatives—parents, children, siblings—shouldn’t mate.”
“More chance of sharing recessives.”
“Right. Hemophilia is a recessive that ran rampant through the royal families of Europe due to intermarriage.”
They sat in silence for the moment, then he noticed Jack refolding the printout and slipping it into a pocket.
“Hey, you can’t have that.”
“I’ll need it to show Christy. She’ll never believe me without it.”
Aaron felt a stab of panic. It had “Creighton” prin
ted in large, boldface type across the top of the sheet.
“No! If she shows it to Bolton he’ll know it was me!”
“Relax. I’ll show her a Xerox with the logo folded out of sight. You’ll have no connection.”
Not good enough.
“But it won’t help you! It has no names!”
“I’ve got to show her something, doc, and this is better than nothing. Be cool. I don’t want to see you hurt. You’re my man on the inside. I’ll keep Creighton out of it. Trust me.”
Trust him? He didn’t know if he could trust anyone at this point. Except maybe this man.
Not that he had a choice. He couldn’t very well take it from him.
More silence as Aaron wondered what Jack was thinking. Then he realized he hadn’t got an answer to his previous question.
“Why didn’t Thompson impregnate Dawn? Did Bolton want to bed his own daughter?”
Jack shrugged. “Maybe he’s sterile. Maybe they don’t know about recessive traits. But then again…” His voice trailed off.
Watching him, Aaron saw a look of growing wonder on Jack’s face.
“What? What is it?”
“Maybe they want to match up certain recessive genes. Maybe that’s been the whole purpose of this scheme all along.” And then he shrugged. “And maybe not.” He smiled. “Too bad I can’t simply ask Bolton next time I run into him.”
Aaron opened his mouth, then closed it again. Here was the perfect time to say something to Jack about Julia giving Bolton his description. He should say something. Really he should…
But he wanted that showdown, wanted Bolton hurt.
Of course it might be Jack who wound up getting hurt, maybe even killed.
Bolton could walk up behind him and gun him down just like he did the abortionists.
But he held his tongue. He’d have to trust that Jack had more street smarts than Bolton. A good bet, since Bolton had been off the streets for the last eighteen years.
Still…all the street smarts in the world wouldn’t stop a bullet in the back.
Sometimes Aaron hated himself.