Undone (10 page)

“Hold it,” Dez said, looking around the group. “Is this the Hollenbeck case?”

Ames informed him that it was not.

“I thought they said ten!” Dez exclaimed. He apologized, bowed, then dodged out.

“Can we finish up, then?” Stubbs said, irritably.

Ames inked Chloe’s thumb and pressed it to the corner of the envelope. He photographed her, sealed the camera and samples in a pouch, and had her sign the safety tape. He called the receptionist to summon a courier.

Thirty minutes later, the swabs (labeled “Donor B”) were en route to DDS Diagnostics in Fairfield, Ohio, where they arrived the next morning, then languished for four weeks in a temperature- and moisture-controlled room awaiting analysis among the backlog of cases, until an afternoon near the end of May when a technician collected the swabs, then used a pair of sterilized scissors to snip off the Dacron tips. These were placed in a test tube containing a solution that released the skin molecules scraped from the inside of the donor’s cheek. The sample was dye-tagged, heated to ninety-five degrees Celsius in a thermal cycler, and then lowered to sixty degrees and finally heated back up to seventy-two degrees, to elongate the DNA strand. This strand, with its arrangement of bases and pairs laid out along the chromosome, was injected into a capillary electrophoresis genetic analyzer—a tube the circumference of a hair—and subjected to a laser scan that revealed a picture of the DNA profile, including those short genetic sequences, called alleles, shared by parents and their biological offspring. Had Chloe’s actual sample been sent, the lab workers would have readily seen that there was no match. But as things stood, the sample, when compared with alleles from Donor A (submitted by Jasper Ulrickson of 10 Cherry Tree Lane, Clay Cross, Connecticut), revealed that Donor A was, to a 99.9 percent degree of certainty, the father of Donor B.

Informed of this result, Stubbs, at the Department of Children
and Families, notified Mrs. Barnes, who in turn telephoned Chloe at the home of her foster family. Mrs. Gaitskill, hearing the news, clapped her hands excitedly and chanted, “You’re going to know your father! You’re going to know your father!” Her husband began playing a plunging, triumphal rendition of “O Sons and Daughters, Let Us Sing!” on the piano, and Mrs. Gaitskill lifted her voice in song:

When the last ringing chord died away, Chloe excused herself—saying she “just needed to be alone for a minute to process everything”—and ran up to her room. There, she called Dez and told him the tidings. He was, to understate the case considerably, relieved. A slight chance had existed of Maddy’s sample being contaminated or damaged in transit, thus yielding a result known, in DNA testing, as an “exclusion,” which required a second test—a do-over. This had seemed cold comfort to Dez, who doubted he would ever again be able to talk his way into Ulrickson’s home to collect a new sample from Maddy. How much sleep had he lost lately, tossing and turning on the Tartarus’s narrow bed, trying to dream up alternate methods of collecting a new sample in case of an exclusion (enroll, briefly, as a teacher at the brat’s preschool?). But he could forget about all that now and concentrate on the plan’s next phase—a phase to which he had devoted several even more stubborn insomnias.

I
t was an unpleasant detail, a dangling loose end the removal of which he had deliberately not focused on in advance, lest the enormity of the act prevent him from undertaking the entire project in the first place.

Whatever faults of character Dez possessed, he was not a violent man. He had not, for instance, been able to fight back against that father who collared him at the bus stop all those years ago. In those episodes of “self-blinding” during Geld’s aversion therapy, no imagery could more reliably dampen desire than imagined scenes of torture, maiming and murder. And at the heart of his contempt for his father had always been the cavalier way Judge Dezollet consigned those sad killers, mental
defectives and abuse victims to the gas chamber, electric chair and lethal injection—where death (Dez knew, from an ill-advised glimpse into one of the execution reports prepared for his father) came not with the clinical efficiency fondly imagined by proponents of capital punishment, but with writhing and cries, whimpers and pleadings, tears, vomit, blood, smoking scalps and pitiful loosened bowels.

Yet for the plan to go forward from this point, he must rise above that physical and moral squeamishness; he must behave like a good soldier; he must commit the act whose name he could not even pronounce to himself. No use pretending that Ames could remain forever a silent partner; once apprised of the crime he had been inveigled in (and a splashily public denouement was virtually the scheme’s main
point
), that silence was something Dez would have to pay for dearly, in blackmail payments. No, no. No point trying to delude himself that a cash-strapped father of three would fail to return to the money well. Not that money was the problem. Dez would happily pay off forever, if it meant avoiding the act he was now obliged to commit. It was the inevitable, ongoing contact between blackmailer and black-mailee that had to be avoided. Such contact would perforce open up dangers of accidental exposure—an unacceptable risk.

God knew, he had tried to avoid this—tried to devise a plan that involved no one but himself and Chloe. In the early stages of planning, he had considered taking the six months’ training necessary to earn his own phlebotomy credentials—a scheme he soon discarded, since the requisite background check would as a matter of course turn up his compromised legal
past. He toyed, mentally, with enrolling in classes on sleight-of-hand magic so that he might, while posing as Chloe’s lawyer, accompany her to the clinic and somehow accomplish an act of sample switching. But Dez, for all his mental agility, was notoriously fumble-fingered. The notion of him performing a Ricky Jay–like bait and switch under the eye of a watchful trained professional … well, that was clearly hopeless, and Dez abandoned that plan too.

There were other imagined strategies (Chloe feigning a seizure so that Dez might gingerly remove the sample envelope from the phlebotomist’s distracted grip and switch it for Maddy’s; or Dez himself mimicking an exploded appendix while Chloe accomplished the switch). But he had, eventually, reluctantly, faced the fact that there was one way, and one way only, to beat the chain-of-custody safeguards—and that was to enlist a short-term accomplice, a paid pawn who, owing precisely to his very ignorance of the larger chess game, must, once his role in the combination was complete, be removed from the board. How precisely that “removal” was to be accomplished, Dez had not allowed himself to look at squarely. There were so many nearly insuperable obstacles that he was first obliged to clear—that risky masquerade as the furnace repairman chief among them—that this later erasure had seemed comfortably hypothetical. Now, it was anything but.

For weeks, he had imagined that a timed-release poison (slipped into a Coke or a beer?) was the best method, allowing Dez time to get away before the retching and coughing and convulsions. But a little Internet research on toxic compounds
had brought up a news story from the St. Louis
Dispatch
about a female murderer undone by investigators who combed her computer and found Web searches for “instant poisons,” “undetectable poisons” and “fatal digoxin dose.” Dez instantly shut down his search and abandoned all further thought of poison.

He ruminated on luring his prey to the top of one of the blue-misted mountains that loomed over Sayer’s Cliff, and using an almost accidental elbow nudge to send his man sailing into the void—but abandoned this dream upon recalling the sheer size of his would-be victim (Dez would have to take a run at him, like a defensive tackle—and even at that, he might fail to topple him, the man turning, windmilling his arms, reaching out to grasp Dez, pulling him down too). Only after wasting time over these, and countless other, unworkable plots had he finally gotten serious and arrived at the sole strategy that could conceivably have a chance of success: that of the violent surprise attack during the man’s routine, daily rounds. For some days now, Dez had been planning to bus into Newport to make a visit of inspection at the future scene of the crime, and to gather some necessary intel in order to implement it. He could delay no longer.

On the bus ride into Newport, on a dull gray morning the day after receiving the DNA result, he tried to empty his mind of the violent visions that were trying to breed there. Best not to visualize, too clearly, the act in advance.

At noon, he found himself standing outside the G-Tek Clinic. He kept his face averted as he strolled past the big plate glass window (so as not to draw premature attention from the weirdly
observant receptionist), then ducked down the alley that separated the building from the adjacent nail parlor. At the end was a weedy lane bounded on one side by the backs of the buildings and on the other by a wooden fence. Ames had mentioned the other day that he always parked “out back.” There was no way of knowing which of the four automobiles stowed there now was his victim’s, but he could settle that in a minute. The main thing was to establish whether there was a suitable place for Dez to lie in wait, lug wrench or baseball bat at the ready.

Running vertically up the wall of the building, a few feet from the back door, was an immense duct, chipped and over-painted many times. Dez experimentally fitted himself into the nook formed where the pipe met the wall. Yes. Yes, this would do admirably. He would hide here this evening, then creep out, on tiptoe, as his unsuspecting prey emerged from the clinic’s back door and took the five or six paces over to his car. Shimmer out from the shadows, weapon raised.

He could see and feel how that first blow would stove in the back of the head with a sensation of heavy iron sinking into soft watermelon. He must be careful to land the blow squarely lest he simply graze the head, cleaving away an ear or opening a sanguineously spurting, but not fatal, scalp wound, allowing his victim to swing around and begin to fight back. He would take the time to aim that first blow at the place where Ames’s hair whorled in a spiral from the thinning crown, he would smack that sweet spot in a two-handed downward chopping motion, felling the man. Then he would deliver a series of added blows, to ensure that his victim was well and truly dead,
pound the brain and face and eyeballs and tongue and hair to a consistency resembling steak tartare. At the thought, he grew light-headed, and nausea fluttered his guts. He bent at the waist, dry-retching briefly.

Still woozy, he walked back up the alley to the sidewalk in front of the building. He was now obliged to enter the establishment, to drop in, unannounced, on Ames, invite him out to lunch and, under the pretext of friendly conversation, draw him out on the make of his car and what time he left work each day. A difficult task, especially given that his victim might, for good reason, be suspicious of such attentions from Dez. Still, there was nothing for it. He needed this information and, short of trying to pry it casually out of the receptionist (could he
do
that?), Dez could not figure out how else to get it. He squared his shoulders, pasted on his face what he hoped looked like a friendly, innocent smile, then pushed in through the glass door.

Advancing toward the desk, and seeing the odd expression on the receptionist’s face at the sight of him, Dez instantly knew something was wrong. Had Ames already blabbed about his sample-switching exploit to his coworkers? But no, that did not seem to be it. For when Dez stepped up to the desk and boldly asked to see Mr. Ames, the woman, instead of looking at him with suspicion or accusation, gave him a melting look of commiseration.

“Oh—then you haven’t heard,” she said.

And that is when she told him, between sniffles and dabbings at her eyes with a crumpled napkin, about the accident. Just a week ago now. So terrible. On that Italian-made motorcycle that
Duncan was so proud of, that he saved so carefully for. And on his debut outing! Simply lost control—apparently those things are so much more powerful than the American-made bikes Dunc was familiar with. The cops later estimated that the poor man was doing about eighty when he hit the bridge abutment. He was wearing a helmet, for all the good it did him. Split the plastic like a nutshell. Killed instantly—which was, she guessed, a blessing of sorts. “He didn’t suffer.”

Disbelief was the primary sensation that assailed him, disbelief that gave rise to a floating, hovering sensation of hushed, eerie, cosmic solemnity and then to a widening, spreading sense of expanding incredulity that fate or luck or destiny or Providence was so allied with him as to effect the necessary removal in so timely a manner and entirely without his agency. For Dez had no way of knowing that the motorcycle in question, a Ducati Monster 620 Dark, had been purchased with the money Dez himself had paid to the deceased. Nevertheless, he did feel sufficiently spooked by the synchronous happenstance as to wonder if his visions, seconds ago, about splitting open the man’s head had, through some infolding of the space-time continuum, retroactively catalyzed the accident.

Dez said how sorry he was, that he had dropped in to see if old Duncan wanted to grab some lunch, that it was a dreadful tragedy—think of those three kids and his widow; he must send them some money! It was all so horrible, so incomprehensible, the fragility of life, how everything just hung by a thread. Backing toward the door, Dez cast an eye over the table where, not so
long ago, he had studied that fascinating teen fashion magazine and that ever-so-stimulating advertisement. He thought about pausing to dig through the strewn periodicals and discreetly rip out the page for inclusion in his “files,” but decided, under the circumstances, to let it pass.

“D
ad?” Maddy said. “What’s a Ella Menno?”