“Mind if I join you two?”
“Hello, Max,” Sara said. “Max, you know Eric Blake, don’t you?”
“I believe we’ve met,” Bernstein said. “How are you, Doctor?”
“Very well, thank you,” Eric replied as the beeper on his belt went off. “If you two will excuse me, I have to go.”
“Emergency?” Max asked.
“No. Just time for rounds.”
Max scratched his face hard, like he had fleas. “Can I ask you a quick question before you go?”
Eric stopped. “Of course.”
“When was the last time you saw Dr. Grey alive?”
Eric thought a moment. “The day he left for Cancún.”
“Did he look the same to you?”
“The same? I don’t understand.”
“I mean, was his hair still dark and did he still have a beard?”
“Yes,” Eric said without hesitation. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Thanks, Eric.”
“Anytime, Lieutenant. I’ll see you later, Sara.”
“Bye, Eric.”
Eric Blake neatly piled the garbage on his tray before leaving. When he brought his tray to the window, he was the only one who took the time to sort his silverware.
Sara turned to Max. “I called you three times today.”
“Sorry. It’s been a busy day.”
“Are you getting much flak about the castration story in the news?”
Max’s whole body seemed to shrug. “Nothing I can’t handle with a grenade launcher and tear gas.”
“I can imagine. Okay, so what have you learned?”
He leaned forward, his right elbow on the table, his left arm thrown behind the back of the chair. “First of all, Bruce Grey had blond hair and no beard when he allegedly jumped out the window. He also was wearing cosmetic contact lenses to change the color of his eyes. I checked with several of his friends, even the limousine driver who dropped him off at the airport. Bruce definitely had dark hair and the beard when he left New York.”
Sara nodded. “As you would say, ‘Interesting.’ ”
“To say the least. But there’s more.” He quickly told her about the rest of his conversation with Hector Rodriquez at the Days Inn. Sara sat stunned, quietly listening.
“Then Grey didn’t commit suicide,” she said when Max finished.
“He was murdered, Sara. I’m sure of it.”
“And someone wanted to make it look like a suicide,” she said.
“Seems so,” Max replied.
“Hmmm. Bruce’s murder has to be connected to the stabbings, agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“So why did the killer want to make Bruce’s death look like a suicide while doing nothing to hide the fact that the other three were murdered?”
“I don’t know,” Max said. He stood up, circled the table for no apparent reason, and sat back down.
“Max.”
“What?”
“You’re playing with your hair again.”
Bernstein looked up at his right hand. Strands of hair were wrapped around his middle finger as though it were a curler. He untangled his finger and put his hands on the table. “Saves on a perm,” he explained with a smile.
“So what else did you learn?”
He leaned forward. “This morning I went through the personal possessions found in Grey’s hotel room. Everything was there — wallet, ID, cash, credit cards, briefcase, change of clothes — even passport.”
“So?”
“There was no stamp for Mexico on the passport.”
“No mystery there. You don’t need to use your passport to go into Mexico. Just proof of citizenship.”
“Then why did he bring it with him?”
She shrugged. “What else did you find in the passport?”
“It’s what I didn’t find,” he said. “You know those pages where the customs officials stamp the country you’re visiting?”
“Yes.”
“One of those pages had been neatly clipped out of Grey’s passport. You would never notice unless you looked at it closely.”
Sara looked up at the ceiling. “So the killer doesn’t want anyone to see what was on that page. Maybe Bruce never went to Mexico. Maybe he went someplace else and the killer doesn’t want us to know where.”
“My thinking exactly. So I called the Oasis Hotel down in Cancún.”
“Did he check in?”
“Yes.”
She waited for him to continue but he just sat there, smiling. “Max, stop playing games with me. What happened?”
“I called your old contact at customs and immigration.”
“Don Scharf?”
“Right. I know I should have asked you first, but time was of the essence. Anyway, he remembered me from that case we did a few years back where that rapist fled to Puerto Rico.”
“What did you find out?”
“Well, it took a while but we finally traced down where Bruce went.”
“And?”
“And Bruce did go down to Cancún first. But he flew out of Mexico the very next day.”
“So where did he go?”
Max smiled. “Bangkok.”
“There’s no question about it, Eric,” Winston O’Connor, chief lab technician at the Sidney Pavilion, said with his Alabama twang. O’Connor had been working for the clinic since its inception and, in fact, had not lived in the South since entering Columbia University eighteen years ago. Still, the years had not subdued Winston’s deep Southern accent. “Take another look at the Western blot. The band pattern is unmistakable.”
Eric swallowed and reached out his hand. The wall clock, one of those noisy kinds that schools used, read five ten a.m. When was the last time he had left the clinic? Eric did a little quick math. Forty hours ago. He needed sleep something terrible, but all of a sudden he felt wide-awake.
He glanced down at the photograph and remained silent for a moment. Eric knew what the readings meant, but he kept staring at them anyway, as though he could make the bands on the photograph slide lower or higher by just concentrating on them. “Let me take a look at the ELISA test.”
Winston sighed. “We’ve already looked at it twice.”
“I want to look at it again. You sure you used the right sample?”
Winston looked at him strangely. “Are you kidding?”
“I want to make sure.”
“You were standing here when I did it,” Winston said. “I don’t make mistakes on these kinds of things. Neither do you.”
Eric lowered his head. “I know. I’m sorry.”
Winston crossed the room and opened a door that looked like it belonged on a refrigerator. His hand reached in and extracted a plate. “Here. And here’s the digital readout of the optical density.”
“Get me the T cell study too.”
“Again?”
Eric nodded.
“Here,” Winston said a moment later. “What the hell you looking for, Eric?”
Eric did not respond. He examined all the tests and studies at least a dozen more times. Somewhere in the background he could hear Winston sigh and curse under his breath every time Eric asked to look at the same thing again.
“For crying out loud,” Winston half snapped, “how many times are you going to view this stuff? There’s no mistake here. Shoot, we’ve never made a mistake on this test — ever.”
“It can’t be,” Eric muttered. “It just can’t be.”
“We’ve had hundreds of positive HIV tests come through here,” Winston continued. “Why all the double checking on this one? I’ve run the ELISA and the Western on this guy twice now. There’s no question about the results.”
Eric moved to a chair as though stunned by a blow to the head. He slowly picked up the phone and dialed.
“Who you calling?” Winston asked.
His voice came from far away. “Harvey.”