Skeleton Justice (2 page)

Jake looked up from the case folder he’d brought with him to Il Postino in time to see Manny crossing the street toward his sidewalk table. Red hair flying, hips swaying, high heels tapping, Manny made quite a few heads turn as she strode through the early-evening crowd. It pleased him that she didn’t seem to notice the effect she had.

Now she caught sight of him and waved. He rose to greet her and she kissed him lightly before settling Mycroft under the table.

“Where are your groupies?” Manny asked.

“Huh?”

“You’re quite a celebrity—front page of the
New York Post.”
Manny grinned as she took the newspaper from her bag and read the headline aloud, “‘ME Enters Vampire Investigation.’ That must’ve really pissed Pederson off.”

Jake stared at her.

“Your jaw’s dropping. You want to be careful of that, eating outside in New York. Flies, you know.”

Jake started to laugh. Why did it surprise him that Manny had immediately grasped the trouble that trip to St. Vincent’s had brought him? No sooner had he exited the hospital than he’d been besieged by a horde of TV and print reporters. His natural reaction was to answer their questions briefly but honestly. Stupid—when would he ever learn? Somehow, they had managed to spin his responses into lead stories, and their flashing cameras had splashed his startled face across all three New York dailies and the evening news.

“I wish you’d’ve been with me yesterday,” Jake said. “You would’ve known to throw a jacket over my head and ‘No comment’ me out of there.”

“How did Pederson react?”

“Let’s just say I thought I was going to have an opportunity to brush up on my CPR.”

The post-Fiore lecture had gone on and on: “violating jurisdictional boundaries;” “no regard for chain of command;” “no understanding of limited resources. …” For Pederson, work was all about protecting his turf, hoarding his budget, and ramping up his media coverage. With one unauthorized trip, Jake had managed to score a trifecta of violations.

“You know he thinks you’re angling for his job.” Manny tapped the newspaper. “He sees this as grandstanding.”

“I didn’t know they’d be lying in wait for me,” Jake protested. “And I don’t want to be chief ME. Balancing budgets and sitting through endless meetings—no thanks.”

“I know you like nothing better than being elbow-deep in an abdominal cavity, looking for signs of unnatural death.” Manny reached for his hand resting on the table. “You have to remember that not everyone understands the appeal.”

The soft touch of Manny’s fingers took the sting out of her words. Her ability to go straight to the crux of a problem had caught his attention the moment he’d met her; her beauty had dawned on him a little later.

“Yeah, this little escapade of mine has had unintended consequences. Pederson has explicitly warned me off the Vampire case.”

“So you’re dropping it?” Manny’s eyes opened wide, then, as she caught sight of the blue case folder beside his plate, crinkled into a smile. “You scared me there for a minute—thought you were going soft.”

The waiter approached the table, introduced himself as Luigi, and rattled off the specials.

“I’ll have the wild prawns,” Manny said without hesitation.

Jake continued to scan the menu. “Do you know that shrimp are scavengers? I once autopsied a pilot whose plane crashed into the ocean. Had to take half a dozen off his body. Funny, too, because the poor guy had shrimp in his stomach—his last meal. Gave new meaning to the word
payback
.”

The waiter looked pale. Manny’s stomach grumbled loudly. “You know, I may just go vegan tonight. I’ll start with a large salad. …”

“Careful,
E. coli
gives leafy greens serial-killer potential,” Jake whispered.

Manny shuddered. “If I had your job, I wouldn’t be able to stomach anything more than applesauce and dry toast.”

“I’ll get you a position as a morgue assistant.” He slipped his arm around her and squeezed her shoulder. “The Diener Diet! The newest way to lose weight. I bet you could get on
Oprah
with that.”

Her flimsy shoe, which had been tracing a delicate pattern up and down his calf, crashed down on his instep like a guillotine. He grinned. The pain was worth it.

After the waiter finally left with an uncontroversial order of salad, appetizer, pasta, and steak, Jake set about making amends.

“I was hoping you’d help me brainstorm.” Jake edged the case folder toward Manny, and caught her glancing at the label. “Will you take a look for me?”

Manny twisted around to face him and flipped the folder open. “Other men seduce women by telling them they’re beautiful and sexy. You do it by whispering pathology reports in my ear.”

Jake grinned. “I admire you too much to take such a hackneyed approach. Look at this.”

Manny and Jake began to sort through the paperwork, focusing on the test results from Vampire victims that he had brought with him. Jake stared at the jumble of numbers and medical terminology. What was it the Vampire was looking for in this blood? None of the toxicology reports showed substances normally associated with drug abuse, so the victims weren’t linked through a shared drug habit. Another door closed.

By the time the appetizer arrived, the waiter had to struggle to find a paper-free spot on the table to set Jake’s calamari.

Manny stared at the reports. “No motive?”

“None. Pasquarelli thinks he’s a nut. But there’s more here. These are organized blood draws. They don’t have the characteristics of a disorganized mind. The victims didn’t know what happened to them until they woke up and saw the holes in their skin or the blood droplets on their clothes, the swelling, the beginnings of black-and-blue marks. Hallmarks of neat, precise, and carefully plotted attacks.”

“The Devil Bat,”
Manny muttered.

Jake gulped from his glass of ice water and waited. Manny was usually very analytical, yet totally open to every possibility, able to see connections a more cautious mind would overlook. That passion, that lightning response, had attracted him in the first place. But sometimes her sudden reversals, the wild leaps in her thought process, left his relentlessly logical mind floundering.

“A forties horror movie with Bela Lugosi,” she explained. “Used to watch the reruns with my father when I was growing up.”

Signs of a misspent youth
, he thought, but he didn’t say it aloud, or else the spike of her heel would be in his calf, rather than massaging it.

“The movie’s villain was a beloved town doctor who killed to seek revenge for wrongs he perceived had been committed against him.”

“You have something against doctors?”

“I’m a lawyer, remember. A mixed marriage between the two professions would never work. Like the Hatfields and McCoys.”

“Or Romeo and Juliet.”

“They committed suicide. I rest my case.”

Jake shuffled his papers to bring Manny back to the here and now.

“Blood is what the guy is after, so somehow these people must be linked by their blood,” she said. “Do they share a common disease?”

“None of them is HIV-positive. Two are diabetic. One must be an alcoholic—terrible liver function.” Jake rattled off the facts, tapping the pertinent data with the tip of his pencil. “But those are the results of running standard blood work. We can’t test for every obscure disease in the book—it would take forever. We have to have some idea of what to look for, then run the test to prove or disprove the theory. Otherwise, you’re searching for a needle in a haystack.”

“So they could all be linked by having some rare disease, but you just don’t know which one?”

“Possible, but unlikely. The police CSI team interviewed them all. No one has any unusual symptoms or medical history.”

“What about the DNA profile?”

“The results have come back on only the first three. We’re still waiting on the two latest. But these people are not related. And no genetic anomalies.”

Manny chewed a zucchini flower and thought for a long moment before speaking. “Do you know how much blood he draws?”

“It’s impossible to know the precise amount, but the victims were all checked out after the attacks and they had normal blood volume, so he’s probably taking a vial at most.”

“All right.” Manny gestured with a forkful of draped arugula. “My knowledge of bizarre satanic rituals is admittedly small, but it seems to me if he were taking the blood for some kinky reason, he’d want more of it, yes?”

“I agree,” Jake said. “I think he’s doing what we’re doing—testing it.”

“Himself, or sending it to a lab?”

“Certain basic tests he could do himself with the right materials, or he could send the blood out to a lab. There are hundreds on the East Coast alone. We’d never be able to check them all.”

“But not for DNA testing,” Manny prompted. “You can’t do that on your kitchen table. And because of the backlog, it usually takes months to get DNA results back. Believe me, my innocent clients know how behind those labs are.”

“Those are the labs accredited to do forensic DNA testing. There are private labs, too, like the ones you see ads for on the subway—places that do paternity testing for civil cases.”

“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been underground in New York City since the St. James class trip to the Museum of Natural History.”

Jake let her comment pass. Every once in a while, Manny’s Jersey girl bridge and tunnel gene reared its head. He preferred not to dwell on the fact that when she had been puzzling over Dick and Jane in her green plaid Catholic school uniform, he had been a senior at City College. He waggled his pen at her. “But why go to all the trouble of collecting blood if all you want is a DNA match? He could get that much more easily by collecting a few hairs or picking up a cigarette butt from his targets. What he’s looking for has to be something you can find only in blood.”

“So tell Pasquarelli to start subpoenaing every blood lab in the metro area till he finds the one that worked on these samples.”

Jake massaged his temples at the thought of the massive paperwork this would entail. “Pasquarelli’s already thought of that. He was hoping I could come up with something a little less labor-intensive. But I guess the Vampire will stay on the front page of the papers for another week. The mayor won’t be happy.”

“Pasquarelli may be in luck there,” Manny replied. “I was listening to the evening news while I was getting dressed tonight. The Vampire’s been pushed aside by the Preppy Terrorists.”

“And who, pray tell, are the Preppy Terrorists?” Jake dug into his steak, trying to ignore the sensation of Manny’s gaze boring into him. It was like eating while Mycroft watched every bite travel from plate to mouth. “Did you want to try some of this?”

“Certainly not! This hand-rolled fettucine is just delicious.” Manny slowly sucked a strand between her lips to prove her point, then continued. “The Preppy Terrorists are a couple of kids from the Monet Academy who got it in their heads that it would be a fun science experiment to put a small incendiary device under a U.S. mailbox in Hoboken.”

“That’s pushing the Vampire off the front page? We used to put firecrackers in old man Isbrantsen’s mailbox whenever he’d confiscate our kickball.”

“Was a federal judge ever strolling by when you did it? Because that’s what happened in Hoboken. Judge Patrick Brueninger took a piece of twisted metal in the throat.”

“Brueninger. That name sounds familiar. Wait—wasn’t he the federal judge who presided over the Iqbar case?”

“You got it.”

Jake drained the last of his Chianti. “These kids tried to take him down? Why?”

“Too soon to know,” Manny said. “There are certainly quite a few Muslims who don’t think the mullah got a fair trial. They swear that Iqbar really was just running a nice friendly mosque in Jersey City.”

Jake snorted. “Right. Not laundering millions to finance the Taliban in Afghanistan. But these prep school boys aren’t Muslims, right? Why would they want to off the judge?”

“Exactly—no motive whatsoever. My guess is it’s just a prank gone terribly wrong. But with 9/11 and anthrax and the shoe bomber, the FBI’s talking about prosecuting these kids to the fullest extent of the law, just to prove that they don’t go after only dark-haired guys in turbans. These kids are toast. They’re going to be—”

Manny was interrupted by a tinny rendition of the opening strains of George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone” emanating from somewhere under the table. She dived down, resurfaced with her Fendi bag from the designer’s newest collection, and answered her cell phone before George could utter another note of his trademark tune.

Sorry
, she mouthed silently at Jake. “Hi, Kenneth,” she trilled into the phone. “What’s up?”

Jake’s eyebrows lowered. He still was a tad suspect of Manny’s paralegal assistant, Kenneth, a former client whose knowledge of the law stemmed from the two times he’d been arrested. Kenneth consulted with Manny at least twenty times a day on items ranging from the latest gossip on the Web page of the New York Social Diary to the advantages of arguing stare decisis in a brief submitted to the federal second circuit court of appeals.