Fatal Care (32 page)

“Until he decided to go kinky on you?” Joanna coaxed.

“Jesus,” Nancy hissed softly. “I couldn’t believe it. Who needs that kind of stuff?”

“Apparently Alex Mirren did.”

Nancy nodded again, her face hardening. “He became such a bastard after that. He literally threw me out of the back lab, and that hurt.”

“Are you talking about the cut in salary?”

“It was more than that,” Nancy told her. “The back lab really represented the future of medicine. It was fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Particularly the stem cell work.”

A waitress came by to refill their coffee cups. Joanna waited for the waitress to leave, and then asked, “How far along had their stem cell work progressed?”

“Not very far,” Nancy said. “They had gotten the stem cells to grow in culture, but they had difficulty making them differentiate into other cell types.”

“They had no luck at all?”

Nancy hesitated, thinking back. “One of the cell lines had grown into something that looked like lung tissue, but the cells died off. I think that was the closest they came to cell differentiation.”

Joanna recalled Eric Brennerman telling her the same thing during her tour of the hot zone laboratory at Bio-Med. In her mind’s eye she could see the technician wearing a space suit with its oxygen tube attached. And behind the technician there was a door that led to another back room. “Did you do much work in the back room of the hot zone lab?”

“You mean the one that has the little surgical table?”

“Yes.”

Nancy shook her head. “I did very little in that room. Most of the work back there was done by Brennerman and Mirren.”

“What’d they work on?”

“Ears,” Nancy replied. “They were implanting plastic ears covered with human skin cells into the backs of rats. The rats were genetically programmed to accept the human skin cells as their own. Once the ears were sufficiently encased in human cells, they could be removed and transplanted onto a human who was missing an ear.”

“I saw something like that in a genetics laboratory at Memorial,” Joanna said. “As a matter of fact, it sounds identical to the work they were doing.”

Nancy nodded. “I think it’s a collaborative venture between Memorial and Bio-Med.”

Just like the damn lipolytic enzyme that was causing cancer, Joanna thought sourly. The third patient to develop cancer had died at Memorial the night before from a massive pulmonary embolus. Joanna was scheduled to do the autopsy on him tomorrow morning.

She brought her mind back to the hot zone laboratory at Bio-Med. Something was wrong in that laboratory. She knew it. Mack Brown knew it. But what was it? “I’d love to get into that lab and look around,” Joanna said, thinking aloud.

“They’d never let you in,” Nancy said. “And you couldn’t sneak in because you don’t know the entry code.”

“And I’d have to put on that damn space suit, too.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Nancy said quietly.

Joanna leaned forward. “I thought everybody in there wears those suits.”

“Not everybody,” Nancy informed her. “The technicians always wear space suits, but I’ve seen Brennerman and Mirren walk through there and go into the back room with only surgical masks on.”

“How many times did you see that?” Joanna asked.

“At least twice.”

“And you’re sure the technician was wearing a space suit at that time?”

Nancy nodded firmly. “I was the technician wearing the space suit.”

“This gets stranger and stranger,” Joanna said, glancing at her watch and reaching for the check. “There are a few things more I need to ask, but I’ve really got to run. Maybe we could have lunch again next week?”

“I’d like that.”

The women walked over to the cashier’s counter, where a line of people were still waiting for tables. At the rear of the line, a man carefully studied the profiles of the two women. When he was certain who they were, he abruptly turned and left the restaurant.

The security guard from Bio-Med punched numbers into his cell phone as he hurried back to his car.

Joanna was taking off her makeup when the doorbell rang. She dabbed on some lipstick, wondering who it could be. It was after eleven, and outside the weather was foul with wind and rain. The doorbell rang again. She hurried into the living room and peeked through the peephole. Jake was standing in the rain with no raincoat, his hair dripping wet.

Joanna quickly opened the door and stared at him. “Is anything wrong?”

“Nope,” Jake said. “I just need some questions answered.”

Joanna looked at him strangely. “At midnight in the middle of a thunderstorm?”

“Wait until you hear the questions.”

Joanna stepped aside. “You’d better get in here before you catch pneumonia.”

Jake went directly to the fireplace and stood close to the dying flames. “I tried to call you, but all I got was a busy signal.”

“I was talking to Kate in Paris.”

“For over two hours?”

“We had a lot to talk about.”

“Is she all right?” Jake asked, concerned.

“She’s fine,” Joanna said, but that wasn’t true. Her sister Kate was having marital problems. Kate’s husband was cheating on her with his secretary. And this wasn’t the first time it had happened. Joanna wondered for the thousandth time why men and women could never seem to get things right in a relationship.

“Would you like a brandy?” she asked.

“Beer sounds better.”

Joanna turned and headed for the kitchen.

“You might want to put another log on the fire,” she said over her shoulder.

Jake added a small log and then used an iron poker to stir the red-hot coals and get the fire blazing again. He sat on the couch and lit a cigarette, thinking about the abortion clinic and the Russian immigrant who worked there. The threads of the case were starting to come together, but there were still large gaps that needed to be filled in. And there were important questions that could be answered only by a medical expert. Maybe Joanna could help.

“Here you are,” Joanna said, handing him a beer and sitting beside him on the couch. “Now, tell me what brings you out near midnight in the middle of a rainstorm.”

Jake sipped his beer—ice cold and delicious. “It seems that Alex Mirren was into some crazy business.”

“Like what?”

“Like buying the dead babies that the Russian was burying.”

Joanna almost choked on her beer. “What!”

Jake opened his hands wide. “Is that worth a midnight visit in a rainstorm?”

“Holy Christ,” Joanna said softly, her mind racing ahead. “I want all the details. Don’t leave anything out.”

Jake told her about the abortion clinic where the Russian worked and how they were selling infant fetuses to Alex Mirren for five hundred dollars each. He explained how the Russian was a handyman at the clinic and also acted as a deliveryman for the fetuses. Nobody knew or admitted to knowing what Mirren was doing with the dead babies. “So, what do you think?”

Joanna quickly sorted out the facts that fit together from those that didn’t. “You said Mirren demanded that the fetuses be intact?”

“Absolutely,” Jake said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t buy them.”

“But why?” Joanna asked, searching her mind for possible answers. “What could he have been doing with them?”

“Maybe some type of experiment,” Jake suggested.

“On a dead fetus?” Joanna asked back. “There’s nothing you can do with those tissues and organs except look at them.”

Jake shrugged. “All I know is that the fetuses had to be intact.”

Joanna thought through the problem again. Dead fetuses were of no value to an experimental geneticist. Dead organs couldn’t function. They had no physiological or biological capabilities. Dead was dead. Yet Mirren wanted intact fetuses so he could remove their internal organs.

Joanna’s eyes narrowed as she wondered if the fetal organs were really dead. “Find out if the fetuses were packed in ice until they were handed over to Mirren.”

Jake took out his notepad and hurriedly jotted that down. “Why is the ice important?”

“Because organs that are packed in ice can retain their physiologic function for at least twelve hours,” Joanna explained. “That’s why organs for transplants are placed on ice before being shipped out.”

Jake raised an eyebrow. “Do you think the baby organs are being used for transplants?”

“I don’t see how,” Joanna said. “But if Mirren had those fetuses packed in ice, it tells us he wanted those fetal organs while they were still viable.”

“And you’re sure you can’t transplant them, huh?”

“Maybe some of the brain cells,” Joanna told him. She explained how fetal brain cells could be implanted into the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease and how in some cases it seemed to help. “But that wouldn’t explain why Mirren removed the fetuses’ hearts and lungs and all their abdominal organs. Those have no use in transplantation.”

“So why the hell did he want them?”

“That I don’t know.” Joanna sipped her beer slowly, trying to come up with answers. “For starters, let’s see if Mirren wanted those fetuses packed in ice. That would give us a hint as to where to go next.”

Jake shook his head, confused by facts that contradicted one another. “Packed in ice or not, why would anybody want to save dead baby bodies? Why pickle them in a bottle and bury them? That just doesn’t make sense.”

“The smart move would have been to destroy them,” Joanna agreed, nodding. “Why leave evidence like that lying around?”

“In a preserved state, so it would last forever,” Jake added. “It doesn’t make sense.”

He stood up and began pacing across the living room, hands behind him holding his notepad. At the door he stopped and turned, about to say something. But then he discarded the idea and started pacing again. He slowed at the fireplace, staring at the blazing log as if it might give him the answer.

“Let’s back up,” Jake said finally. “Let’s say the bodies had belonged to live babies. Why would somebody preserve them in bottles and bury them? What purpose would that serve?”

“Well, they surely have no value scientifically,” Joanna said thoughtfully.

“Oh, but they have some value to somebody,” Jake countered. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have saved them.”

“But it’s so risky,” Joanna said. “If somebody finds them, like we did, it points to an illegal activity.”

“Yeah. Why risk—?” Jake stopped in midsentence and spun around. “Son of a bitch!”

“What?”

A smile spread across Jake’s face. “Blackmail. It’s got to be blackmail.”

Joanna nodded slowly as she put the facts and clues together and weaved them into a chain of events. “So you think the Russian was blackmailing Mirren, and Mirren got tired of it and had the Russian killed?”

Jake nodded back at her. “That’s exactly how I figure it. The Russian probably found out that the doctor and nurse at the clinic were getting five hundred dollars a head for the fetuses, so he decided to cash in and make a little bundle for himself.”

Joanna shook her head. “There’s one big problem with your theory.”

“What?”

“How did the Russian get those fetuses back after Mirren finished with them? Remember, the Russian was just a deliveryman. Mirrren would have never given him the cut-up fetuses to dispose of, would he?”

“Good point,” Jake said, rethinking his theory. “Mirren would have never shown the Russian those cut-up babies, never in a million years. That would have exposed him to even more blackmail.”

“And things would have gotten totally out of control,” Joanna added.

“Right,” Jake agreed. “Mirren may have been a mean bastard, but he wasn’t stupid.”

“Then how did the Russian get those fetuses?”

Jake pondered the question at length before saying, “Maybe there’s somebody else involved at Bio-Med. Maybe somebody else slipped those cut-up babies to the Russian.”

“But who?”

Jake shrugged his shoulders. “Who the hell knows? But this is blackmail for sure, and it somehow involves Mirren and the Russian.”

Joanna shook her head disgustedly. “The things people will do for money.”

“Particularly when they’re hard up,” Jake said. “And we know the Russian needed money badly.”

“How do we know that?”

“From the letters Farelli found in the Russian’s apartment,” Jake said. “We had them translated. It seems he needed twelve thousand dollars to bring his mother and brother over here from Russia. The letters sounded like his family was getting pretty desperate.”

“So he blackmailed Mirren for twelve thousand dollars?”

“Damn near,” Jake answered. “And the Russian wasn’t stupid, either. He stretched the blackmail out, getting two hundred and fifty dollars per baby. His bank account showed a lot of two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar deposits over the past year.” Jake lit a second cigarette and blew smoke up at the ceiling. “We wondered where all those deposits had come from. And now we know. Blackmail.”

Joanna’s eyes brightened as she smiled up at Jake.

“What?”

“How many deposits did the Russian make?” Joanna asked.

“A lot.”

“Give me an exact number.”

Jake quickly flipped through his notepad until he reached the information he wanted. “The Russian made thirty-two deposits.”

“And how many red dots were present on the two sheets of paper you found in Mirren’s closet?”

Jake grinned broadly. “Thirty-two.”

“So those papers were really maps showing where the fetuses were buried,” Joanna went on. “By the way, how many dots were present on the sheet labeled SMV?”

Jake checked his notepad again. “Twelve.”

“And that’s the number of fetuses discovered at the construction site in Santa Monica.”

“But the label read SMV.”

“I think that means Santa Monica-Venice,” Joanna told him. “The construction site borders those two cities.”

“And the CC on the other sheet could be Culver City,” Jake suggested.

“Or Century City, or a dozen other places.”

Jake started pacing again. “But why did Mirren hold on to those maps?”

“To keep a tally, I guess.”

“But after he had the Russian killed, he didn’t need those maps,” Jake said, flicking his cigarette into the fireplace. “Most people would have destroyed them.”