Fatal Hearts (22 page)

Boyd digested that. “Was there a note?”

“No note, suicide or otherwise. But we did find this on the desk.” Morgan held up a plastic evidence bag. Inside was a thin blood-covered file.

CHAPTER 22

Hayden had just finished answering a few questions from Detective Walker about her statement and signed off on it when she saw Detective Morgan emerge from the house and summon Boyd. When Morgan held up a plastic evidence bag with what looked to be a file in it, her breath caught in her lungs.

From her angle, she could only see Boyd’s face in profile, but that glimpse was sufficient to set her heart pounding. Were the answers he sought in there? Answers Josh might have died for? Would the cops even let him see the file?

She hurried over to his side. “Is that what I think it is?”

A look passed between the two men.

“Speak freely,” Boyd said. “Hayden knows what’s going on.”

“It is what you think it is,” Detective Morgan said. “At least I think it is. It documents the prenatal care of a young woman and the subsequent delivery of male twins on April 7, thirty-five years ago.”

“That’s gotta be you and Josh,” Hayden said.

“What’s her name?” Boyd’s voice broke, and he swallowed. “What’s my mother’s name, Morgan?”

“I’ve got to get direction from the department on this, and they’ll likely need to get direction from legal,” Detective Morgan said. “It’s evidence in an active case. It’s also personal health information. Thanks to the falsification or forging of your birth registration, this could take some sorting out before you’re granted access.”

“Dammit, Morgan, my brother died for that information. I deserve to see it.”

Morgan’s eyes hardened. “Your brother died. It remains to be seen how or why. You’d do well to remember that.”

Boyd’s jaw bulged and the tendons stood out in his neck. Hayden laid a hand on his arm, where the muscles were bunched and ready for a fight. He barely seemed to notice.

“Dr. Gunn intended me to have that information. You know he did.”

“I do know that,” Morgan said in a low voice. “Which is why I’m carrying this file in a see-through evidence bag.”

Hayden and Boyd both dropped their gazes to the blood-soaked file. The label was clearly legible. Duncan, Arianna Lynn.

“Thank you.” Boyd lifted his gaze to the detective’s again. “Jesus . . . thank you.”

Detective Morgan shrugged. “It was laying right there on the desk. In plain sight for Dr. Walsh to notice when she approached the desk to check the vic for a pulse, right?”

Hayden hadn’t noticed much beyond the dead body of Dr. Gunn facedown in the biggest pool of blood she’d seen, in or out of an ER, but she grabbed at the explanation, for Boyd’s sake. “Right.”

Boyd glanced from Morgan to Hayden and back to Morgan again. “I have no words, except thank you.”

“Well, you did us a solid by not screwing with my scene or snagging the file yourself. Least I could do.”

“I appreciate it. Now that I have a name, maybe I can find some answers.”

“Don’t thank me too profusely, McBride. From my admittedly quick perusal of the file, it looks like Arianna Duncan is deceased.”

Hayden drew a surprised breath, then glanced at Boyd. His face had gone completely expressionless, which she’d come to realize meant he was deeply affected.

“I see,” Boyd said, his voice flat.

“I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. But on the other hand, it’s nothing you’re not going to find out when you dig into that name. Although given the deliberate obfuscation of facts that seems to have plagued your birth and adoption, I can see you might want to give that a rigorous look to make sure there really was a young woman named Arianna Lynn Duncan and that she really is dead.”

“I’ll do that.”

“I’m really sorry, man. I’m sure you wanted to meet her, talk to her.”

“Thanks, but it’s not like I didn’t think that was a possibility. As I warned Josh, it’s been thirty-five years. A lot can happen.”

“Wait a minute,” Hayden said. “The death certificate was in the birth file? That seems odd to me. Unless . . . Did she die in childbirth?”

Detective Morgan shook his head. “Not in childbirth, no, but within a few months. And here’s the thing, the reason I’m telling you this—she apparently dropped dead of some kind of heart thing too.”

Hayden gasped. “Like Josh? Sudden cardiac arrest?”

“Cardiac arrest, yes. That’s the term I read.” He looked at Boyd. “I’m giving you this information for your own safety, McBride. I know the results of the genetic testing you had done aren’t back yet, but if your mother and your identical twin died of this, it’s seems pretty certain that there’s a genetic component.”

“Yes, it does,” Boyd said, in a voice Hayden thought was altogether too composed. “About the file—was there anything in it about our adoption?”

“Yeah, there appears to be a signed consent form. Also, a big flag for the nurses reminding them that the babies were being adopted, and while they could show the mother that the twins were healthy, they weren’t to let her hold or nurse them.”

“To prevent her from bonding with them and changing her mind,” Hayden said, imagining that poor woman’s grief at not being able to touch her own babies.

“Look, do you need us to hang around?” Boyd asked. Wow, he was
volunteering
to leave the scene? She would have bet he’d have to be chased off. On the other hand, he’d just been handed a lot to digest—his birth mother’s identity, the fact that she was dead, all but conclusive evidence that he and Josh had both carried a genetic electrocardiographic abnormality.

“Have you given your statement, Dr. Walsh? Signed and everything?”

She nodded. “I have.”

Morgan turned back to Boyd. “I’ll need a minute to read yours, okay?”

Boyd handed the completed form to him.

After a few minutes, Morgan said, “Good job. Couldn’t be clearer.” He handed the statement back to Boyd. “If you’ll just autograph it for me.”

“Great.” Boyd whipped out his pen and, using the deck railing for a desk, signed the statement and handed it back. “You’ve got my cell number if you need anything more from me.”

“And I put mine on my statement,” Hayden put in.

“Then I guess you can both take off. It’s probably just as well you’re not here when the media gets wind of this. Which should be any minute.”

Oh, crap. The media.
Hayden hadn’t even thought of them. She most definitely didn’t want to be on the front page of tomorrow’s paper, standing on Dr. Gunn’s lawn.

Boyd thanked the detective again and the two men shook hands. A minute later, they were in Boyd’s car, driving away.

At the first red light, he turned to her. “Hungry?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s well past noon.”

Hayden couldn’t be less hungry. Her stomach still lurched when she thought about the scene back there in Dr. Gunn’s study. But if Boyd wanted to eat, they should eat. She had the feeling that once he let this new information soak in, he’d throw himself into the investigation and would need the fuel.

“Good idea.” She suggested a unique burger joint downtown that had been a favorite of Josh’s. He could get a big burger while she had a turkey burger with brie and no bun. Surely she could manage that much.

He glanced over at her. “You okay? I know that was rough back there.”

“I’m fine. I’ve seen worse in the ER.”

“I’ll bet.”

He turned his attention back to traffic, leaving her to think about what she’d said. Yes, she’d seen worse in the ER. Sometimes a lot worse. But this had shaken her.

Not the blood, and not the fact that she’d touched a dead body. She’d seen lots of that stuff in her career to date. Rather, it was the whole tableau. Seeing blood and ravaged bodies in a clinical situation was one thing. Seeing it in the field was entirely different. It was so much worse, knowing that mere hours earlier, Dr. Gunn had been on the phone with Boyd. Gunn had probably made his decision during that very conversation. He’d probably hung up, taken out his scalpel, poured himself a whiskey or whatever had been in that old-fashioned leaded crystal glass she’d seen on the desk. Had he tossed it back and done the deed immediately? Or had he sipped it as he contemplated ending his life?

How many scenes like this had Boyd seen? A lot, she was pretty sure.

The silence stretched between them until Hayden felt compelled to break it. “It was good of Ray Morgan to share that stuff with you.”

“Yeah, it was.” He flicked his gaze over to her, then back to traffic. “He said from the beginning he’d share anything that pointed to a health risk for me. But I was thinking more along the lines of toxicology reports.”

“Do you think they’ll let you see the file or have a copy of it?”

“Eventually, maybe. But I doubt I’ll see it anytime soon. There are no legal documents to back up my claim that I’m one of those twin boys and therefore next of kin with a right to see it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it took a court order to make them open it up.” He shot her another glance. “I’m sure Detective Morgan is of a similar mind. That’s no doubt why he told me as much as he did, so I’d have enough information to start putting the puzzle pieces together myself.”

She studied his face in profile. “Will you do that? Bring an application to the courts to get the records?”

“I will, but I expect it’ll take a while,” said Boyd. “I’ll have to connect the dots, and, thanks to lost files and fabricated birth certificates, those dots are damned few and far between.” He stopped for a yellow light that was about to turn red. “I was thinking about something else, though. Morgan said the file contained my mother’s signed consent to the adoption. Yet thirty-five years later, people seem to be dying over it. In what world does that make sense?”

“Maybe she didn’t consent, you mean?” She glanced at him. “That could explain why Dr. Gunn felt guilty enough to commit suicide over this.”

“If it was suicide.”

“Either way, I’d assumed he must have helped someone to obscure the trail so no whiff of scandal could come back on them. You know, put a fake name on the birth record or something. But you’re right—he could have done so much more. He could have practically
stolen
you guys away from your mother.”

“That’s what I was thinking.” He took his eyes off traffic long enough to flick her a glance. “For a doctor to help a family pull off an untraceable adoption, that’s bad. Really bad. But if everyone consented, is it kill-yourself bad? Especially thirty-five years later?”

She glanced at his profile. “Okay, I’m on board with the idea he might have done something worse than help cover something up. But for the record, for some people, especially professionals, reputation is everything. The professional disgrace from an investigation could definitely be enough to drive someone to suicide. Or maybe he just felt responsible for Josh’s death somehow. Maybe that guilt layered on top of the old stuff was enough to put him over the edge.”

“Again, that’s
if
he actually committed suicide.” The light had turned green, and he accelerated through the intersection.

She swept her hair to one side. “So, before I jumped in with my speculation, where were you going with that thought? That your mother might not have consented, I mean.”

“The thought occurred to me that maybe he coerced our mother’s consent. She might have been manipulated or railroaded into giving up her babies. Her family, lover, physician, priest . . . they could have ganged up on her, made her sign that paper. For chrissakes, documents have been forged or altered all over the place with this case. I was just thinking, why should you trust that consent form any more than any other document?”

He braked hard, signaled, and pulled into the crowded parking lot of a Tim Hortons.

She put her hand on the dash to steady herself. “Boyd, are you okay?”

“You know those Internet sites that try to help reunite people with their birth parents?”

The sudden subject change threw her. “Um . . . yeah?”

“Josh had been combing those sites since he was old enough to register us. I used to think what a bitch she was. Not for giving us up—hell, even before I became a cop and saw some damned sad cases, I knew there were times when kids were way better off when their mothers gave them up. But what I
did
blame her for was not registering at one of those damned sites. He never lost faith that he’d find her. I’m sure he nurtured a fantasy of some fairy-tale ending where we’d get to know her and discover we had a big, happy extended family, but year after year, nothing. Then he got the lead that pointed him to Fredericton and turned his life upside down to chase it.”

Hayden’s heart fell. “And now it looks like your mother has been dead all this while.”

“Yeah. Looks like.” He rubbed his face, looking suddenly tired. “I mean, I knew that it was a possibility she could have died somewhere along the line, but it was just that—a
possibility
. Shit, she’d still be a relatively young woman if she were still alive. The far bigger
probability
, to my way of thinking, was that she was alive and well but just didn’t want to connect. I guess this makes me a jerk, huh?”

“Never.” She put a hand on his leg. “It makes you a good big brother. You were just trying to look after Josh, protect him from hurt and disappointment.”

He snorted. “Yeah. And what a bang-up job I did at that.”

“Oh, Boyd, no. Josh was a grown man. And you weren’t his keeper. Whatever happened, happened. We’ll get to the bottom of it. But none of it is your fault. None of it.”

He turned to her. “I could have helped him more.”

“You
were
trying to help him,” she said simply.

He looked away. “I should go to the library and see what I can find in the newspaper archives.”

She grimaced. “It’s Sunday. They won’t be open today. But I’ve got tomorrow off. I’d be happy to go with you then, do whatever I can to help.”

He laughed softly.

“What?”

“This was your day off, and look what I’ve dragged you into. I sure know how to show a girl a good time, huh?”

“You’re not allowed to feel bad about that either,” she said. “You know I’m anxious to get to the bottom of this. Josh wasn’t my brother, but he was my friend, and I need to know what happened to him.”