Mortal Remains (25 page)

She studied him for a few seconds, then seemed to realize she still held his drink. “Oh, how rude of me,” she said, and placed it in front of him. Reentering the kitchen, she stopped at the sink and began to wash her hands, allowing the water to run down her forearms and off her elbows.

Out of habit from scrubbing up,
Earl thought. When distracted, he sometimes did the same.

“If you like, I can order some food, and we can reminisce the night away,” she called over her shoulder, actually sounding festive.

Jesus,
he thought, starting to feel uncomfortable.
Is she coming on to me?
“I’m sorry, Melanie, but I only have time for the drink,” he said, attempting to extricate himself as painlessly as possible from any overture she’d just made. “I’ve a ton of e-mails waiting from my department, and will be hours dealing with them. You know how it is, everyone getting the urge to make decisions when the chief’s away, and then no end of sandbox spats.”

She reached for a towel. “You’re sure? There’s some terrific gourmet French I could have here in twenty minutes.”

“Sorry. But this hit the spot.” He picked up the drink, toasted her with it, and took three healthy swallows, enough to make her think he at least appreciated her bartending efforts. Nasty-tasting concoction.

Then he stood.

She walked over and took his hand. “You always were a stubborn man, Earl.” She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. When he returned the gesture, she leaned in, her breasts brushing up against him.

She hasn’t changed a bit,
he thought.
Still making passes at any half-decent-looking guy.

Outside her building, walking toward the pedestrian overpass that crossed the southern tip of West Street, he figured he’d handled the visit smoothly enough. She hadn’t even asked whom he suspected of being Kelly’s lover. Always a lousy liar, he’d been apprehensive about putting on a show of ignorance.

He looked up behind him and saw her backlit like a tiny mannequin in her penthouse window. To the east, piercing as a phantom pain midst the glitter of lower Manhattan, loomed the area she’d screened off – the void where the Twin Towers once stood.

5:45 P.M.

Hampton Junction

Mark had shown Lucy a full menu of how the human body could fester and fail.

At Zackery Abrams’s she’d seen how pressure sores on a forty-year-old paraplegic could crack the skin along a thigh and open it to the bone. IVs, dressing changes, antibiotics, and painkillers simply held the fort. Skin grafts should have been next, but Zak wouldn’t leave his four-year-old daughter, Christina, in the care of a foster home. “Her mother was killed in the same crash that cost me the use of my legs,” he explained to Lucy, his wan face hardened against the sort of wound that no treatment could cure.

In Christina Halprin’s home the sixty-two-year-old woman explained how her heart was so feeble she could go into acute failure, her lungs filling with fluid, just from making love with Mel, her husband. Rejected as a transplant candidate, and already on every known cardiac medication, she insisted Mark prescribe enough diuretics in order that she could take an extra dose now and then, enough to see her through a special evening with Mel. “So far so good,” she told Lucy, her voice lowered and a soft flush spreading across her cheeks. “Think about it, honey. It’s the one moment when my damned body still feels wonderful. You always read about men going in the saddle. Why not me?”

Lucy got them back out on the highway, and they drove in silence for a while.

“It’s not bullets or bugs you’d be afraid of,” she said out of the blue after they’d gone a few miles.

“What do you mean?”

“Before, when we were talking about
Médecins du Globe
, it’s the having to settle you couldn’t stand, isn’t it? You couldn’t settle for what we do out there, could you?”

“Something like that.”

“I mean, the care you give these people in the middle of nowhere is awesome. And sophisticated. I bet it would kill you to stand by and let a single one of them die a day sooner or suffer a minute longer than they had to for want of medications or equipment.”

“Hey, I’m not some kind of keep-’em-breathing-at-all-costs nut.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just what you do here compared to what we did in the field. Christ, sometimes it was so primitive we were limited to providing little more than food, water, and simple hygiene.”

He said nothing, yet brought his breathing close to a halt, as if her words were about to cut close to a vital organ. The image of his father, a blackened form, the eyes still alive, crept out of the nightmare where he kept it buried. He immediately shoved it away.

“I mean, you really go all out, won’t – no, make that
can’t
settle for less.”

Again he said nothing, wishing she’d take the hint that he didn’t want to talk about it.

“I meant it as a compliment,” she added, his silence obviously making her uneasy.

“Look, if they’re comfortable and want to stay home, and I can swing it, why not? All it takes is I make a nuisance of myself at Saratoga General, borrowing stuff, so don’t make too big a deal of it. Besides, I haven’t many cases like these, and the local medical profession isn’t comfortable about the ones I do. ‘Roper’s specials,’ the doctors in town call them. But they go along because they’d rather lend me what I need than have my Medicaid and Medicare bunch take beds away from their upscale, private-insurance crowd.” He hoped now she’d let it go.

“Well, I for one think it’s cool, and a hell of a lot more useful than having to watch someone die for want of ‘stuff’ as you call it. They haunt you forever, every lost one.”

He stared straight ahead.

She had him pegged, all right, and that left him uncomfortable. She must have heard what had happened to read him so well. He wasn’t used to feeling so exposed, yet he forced himself to meet her gaze.

The hint of sadness that he’d caught a glimpse of in her eyes last night had returned in force, and her face sagged into a bleak look of defeat. She’d been describing her own scars, not his.

“You’re right,” he said, relaxing a little. “When it comes to human misery, I’m a retail kind of guy, good at handling it case by case. But wholesale slaughter…” He shuddered, television images of sick, starving babies and children flooding into his head.

“It takes courage to know your limits, Mark.” Her voice became soft. “Believe me, I didn’t know mine when I went overseas. Waded in naive as a schoolgirl, then had no choice but to cope.”

Apart from his giving her the occasional direction, they didn’t talk for a long time. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. She simply seemed as lost in her own thoughts as he in his.

He found himself wondering about her fiancé. She hadn’t mentioned him, despite being so open about her family, brothers, work – almost everything under the sun. Obviously she intended to keep that part of her life private.

They pulled into a parking lot in front of a sleek glass-and-steel, tan building made up of three- and four-story modules, each floor wrapped in black-tinted windows. A modest plaque on the snow-covered grounds near the front entrance read NUCLEUS LABORATORIES.

“The place looks like a cubist’s limousine,” Lucy said. Even at this late hour there were few parking spaces. She pulled into one close to the front door. “What’s a fancy operation like this doing out here?” She reached into a small cooler lodged on the floor of the backseat and retrieved from it the brown paper bag containing a half dozen blood samples they’d drawn from patients over the course of the day. Holding it up between them, she added, “Obviously you don’t keep them in business.”

He grinned, took it from her, and got out of the car. The cold tingled the top of his ears. “Some conglomerate built it about five years ago,” he said, leading the way up a wide set of freshly shoveled stone steps. He gestured to the dark line of thick forest on the perimeter of the property. “Liked the cheap real estate and low taxes, I guess. They mostly do work for insurance companies that underwrite employee health plans for a slew of head offices in New York City. The volume’s huge, and they ship a refrigerator truck worth of samples up here every night of the week. The lab provides state-of-the-art service that does everything from routine bloods to genetic workups for research groups. Even Saratoga General and hospitals in Albany contract out their more exotic testing to them. I’m told that all these things taken together bring in more than enough to pay the heating bills.”

“No offense, but why do they bother with you?”

He winked at her over his shoulder. “Because I know the manager. Come on and see science fiction in the sticks.”

They approached a sliding glass panel that opened automatically and admitted them to a marbled reception area befitting any Park Avenue address. The click of their shoes on the floor echoed like castanets.

“Hi, Doc,” said a spindly, white-haired security guard seated behind a polished curved console with a dozen video screens. He pressed a button that unlocked one of the six mahogany doors behind him with a loud click.

They passed through into a long, white corridor.

Minutes later they shook hands with Victor Feldt, a broad-faced, big-bellied man with a walrus mustache and a complexion that easily flushed. His cheeks glowed as he greeted Lucy. “Welcome to our lab, Dr. O’Connor. May I show you around?”

“Oh, I don’t want to be any trouble-”

“You don’t take the tour, you’ll hurt his feelings,” Mark interrupted. “Victor lives for the chance to show off his pride and joy to visitors, especially ones in the business.”

Victor turned a shade more crimson. “Now that’s not true, Mark. I just thought she’d be interested.”

“And I am, Mr. Feldt. Lead on. This facility looks amazing.”

His cheeks got so red, Mark wondered if he shouldn’t take the man’s blood pressure. He’d been treating his hypertension for years, but Victor kept going off the pills whenever he got a new boyfriend because they affected his sex life. Not that that happened often, Victor being one of the few gay men in Hampton Junction.

Let him have his fun talking shop with Lucy, Mark decided. The blood pressure could wait.

He followed along behind, having received the tour several times during the facility’s first years of operation. Impressive as the layout was – room after room of spinning centrifuges, automated conveyers feeding trays of sample wells into multitask analyzers, chorus lines of pipettes dunking into specimens and sucking them up fifty at a time, then reams of tiny tubing carrying the fluids to more machines that would perform another fifty tests on each of them – it still accomplished nothing more than the basic job of any hospital lab. Break the human body down to a measure of its red cells, white counts, and biochemical ingredients – sodium, potassium, proteins, albumin, and so on. Except this outfit scaled itself to process ten times the load of any single health care institution.

Mark watched Victor animatedly explain the details of the operation to an extent that went far beyond what Lucy could possibly want to know, a mark of his loneliness for intellectual company as much as his enthusiasm for his work. He’d arrived from New York when the lab opened, but gravitated away from Saratoga, unable to afford a place among the rich and famous, yet wary of the homophobia of Hampton Junction. So he’d settled on the no-man’s-land between the two, a pretty but isolated cabin by a lake not far from here, where his lifestyle wouldn’t raise eyebrows. When he wasn’t involved with anyone he substituted the Internet for companionship, and owned one of the most awesome computer setups Mark had ever seen in a private home. Victor approached Mark to be his doctor after several bad experiences with a few general practitioners in Saratoga. “Nothing overt, just that they were old farts and not at ease with handing the potential health problems of someone who’s gay,” he’d explained. “On the other hand, I hear nothing scares you.”

They neared Victor’s pièce de résistance, the section where they did the DNA analyses. Located in an area behind glass windows that could only be accessed through an airlock, some of the machinery looked similar to the other equipment they’d seen, but many pieces were right out of
Star Trek
, and workers inside wore protective clothing.

“Just like in making CDs, we keep a dust-free environment to reduce the risk of contaminating specimens,” Victor explained. “We have a dozen PCR machines, and three dozen electrophoresis units…”

As Victor expounded on the technology of breaking down DNA and separating out specific genes for identification, Mark noticed a change since he’d last been corralled into a tour. There were far more people working in this unit than he remembered, and now it was after hours. “Business must be good as far as the DNA department goes,” he said jokingly, as they returned to the front entrance.

“Booming,” replied Victor in complete earnestness. “We’re even testing for genes that don’t have a confirmed link to diseases yet, but may be a potential risk.”

“Who wants that information?” Lucy asked.

He shrugged. “The New York corporations that have contracts with us. Seems particularly to be the new wave in executive health plans. And, of course, research labs. But we figure the real up-and-coming market will be aging baby boomers who want to know if they’ve got the gene that killed Mom or Dad. Screening for the mutations linked to breast and ovarian cancer, colon cancer, Alzheimer’s – you name it. Real cutting-edge stuff…”

Mark cringed as Victor talked. Unfortunately, his prediction had already begun to materialize. Recently a chain of stores better known for selling soaps and shampoos began to market an expensive screening test to detect genetic defects linked to breast and ovarian cancer, placing the devices on display alongside bath oils and bubble beads. And last month his patients started to bring in magazines normally associated with tips for beautiful homes and fine gardens that now carried ads urging readers to get genetically tuned in to what they should eat and drink by screening for disorders affected by diet. The trouble was, not everyone who has a genetic defect will go on to develop the disease they are at risk for, and at this stage of the game, no one could pick the winners from the losers. Rampant commercialization of the technology would lead to widespread, fruitless, and potentially harmful anxiety, while places like Nucleus Laboratories made a pile of money telling healthy Americans that they were sick. He and Victor had already had heated debates over the issue. But this was Victor’s moment in the sun with Lucy, so Mark held his peace.