Life was not only unfair but sometimes decidedly cruel. That was not a new thought to Reese. It was not even inspired by Janet's untimely and brutal death — or by the fact that Agnes's warm, loving, generous nature was trapped forever inside a body that most men, too focused on appearances, could never love. As a policeman, frequently confronted by the worst in humankind, he had learned a long time ago that cruelty was the way of the world — and that the only defense against it was the love of one's family and a few close friends.
His closest friend, Julio Verdad, arrived as Reese was pouring a third cup of black coffee. Reese got another cup from the cabinet and filled it for Julio, and they sat at the kitchen table.
Julio looked as if he'd had little sleep, and in fact Reese was probably the only person capable of detecting the subtle signs of overwork in the lieutenant. As usual, Julio was well dressed: smartly tailored dark blue suit, crisp white shirt, perfectly knotted maroon-and-blue tie with gold chain, maroon pocket handkerchief, and oxblood Bally loafers. He was as neat and precise and alert as always, but vague sooty smudges were visible under his eyes, and his soft voice was surely if immeasurably softer than usual.
“Up all night?” Reese asked.
“I slept.”
“How long? An hour or two? That's what I thought. You worry me,” Reese said. “You'll wear yourself down to bone someday.”
“This is a special case.”
“They're all special cases to you.”
“I feel a special obligation to the victim, Ernestina.”
“This is the thousandth victim you've felt a special obligation toward,” Reese noted.
Julio shrugged and sipped his coffee. “Sharp wasn't bluffing.”
“About what?”
“About pulling this out of our hands. The names of the victims — Ernestina Hernandez and Rebecca Klienstad — are still in the files, but only the names. Plus a memorandum indicating that federal authorities requested the case be remanded to their jurisdiction for 'reasons of national security.' This morning, when I pushed Folbeck about letting you and me assist the feds, he came down hard. Said, 'Holy fuckin' Christ, Julio, stay out of it. That's an order.' His very words.”
Folbeck was chief of detectives, a devout Mormon who — could hold his own with the most foulmouthed men in the department but who never took the Lord's name in vain. That was where he drew the line. In spite of his vivid and frequent use of four-letter words, Nicholas Folbeck was capable of angrily lecturing any detective heard to mutter a blasphemy. In fact, he'd once told Reese, “Hagerstrom, please don't say 'goddamn' or 'holy Christ' or anything like that in my presence ever again. I purely hate that shit, and I won't fuckin' tolerate it.” If Nick Folbeck's warning to Julio had included blasphemy as well as mere trash talk, the pressure on the department to stay out of this case had come from higher authorities than Anson Sharp.
Reese said, “What about the file on the body-snatching case, Eric Leben's corpse?”
“Same thing,” Julio said. “Removed from our jurisdiction.”
Business talk had taken Reese's mind off last night's bloody dreams of Janet, and his appetite had returned a little. He got another doughnut from the breadbox. He offered one to Julio, but Julio declined. Reese said, “What else have you been up to?”
“For one thing… I went to the library when it opened and read everything I could find on Dr. Eric Leben.”
“Rich, a scientific genius, a business genius, ruthless, cold, too stupid to know he had a great wife — we already know about him.”
“He was also obsessed,” Julio said.
“I guess geniuses usually are, with one thing or another.”
“What obsessed him was immortality.”
Reese frowned. “Say what?”
“As a graduate student, and in the years immediately following his acquisition of a doctorate, when he was one of the brightest young geneticists doing recombinant DNA research anywhere in the world, he wrote articles for a lot of journals and published research papers dealing with various aspects of the extension of the human life span. A flood of articles; the man is driven.”
“Was driven. Remember that garbage truck,” Reese said.
“Even the driest, most technical of those pieces have a… well, a fire in them, a passion that grips you,” Julio said. He pulled a sheet of paper from one of his inside jacket pockets, unfolded it. “This is a line from an article that appeared in a popular science magazine, more colorful than the technical journal stuff: 'It may be possible, ultimately, for man to reshape himself genetically and thereby deny the claim of the grave, to live longer than Methuselah — and even to be both Jesus and Lazarus in one, raising himself up from the mortuary slab even as death lays him down upon it.”
Reese blinked. “Funny, huh? His body's stolen from the morgue, which is sort of being 'raised up,' though not the way he meant it.”
Julio's eyes were strange. “Maybe not funny. Maybe not stolen.”
Reese felt a strangeness coming into his own eyes. He said, “You don't mean… no, of course not.”
“He was a genius with unlimited resources, perhaps the brightest man ever to work in recombinant DNA research, and he was obsessed with staying young and avoiding death. So when he just seems to get up and walk away from a mortuary… is it so impossible to imagine that he did, in fact, get up and walk away?”
Reese felt his chest tightening, and he was surprised to feel a thrill of fear pass through him. “But is such a thing possible, after the injuries he suffered?”
“A few years ago, definitely impossible. But we're living in an age of miracles, or at least in an age of infinite possibilities.”
“But how?”
“That's part of what we'll have to find out. I called UCI and got in touch with Dr. Easton Solberg, whose work on aging is mentioned in Leben's articles. Turns out Leben knew Solberg, looked up to him as a mentor, and for a while they were fairly close. Solberg has great praise for Leben, says he isn't the least surprised that Leben made a fortune out of DNA research, but Solberg also says there was a dark side to Eric Leben. And he's willing to talk about it.”
“What dark side?”
“He wouldn't say on the phone. But we have an appointment with him at UC1 at one o'clock.”
As Julio pushed his chair back and got up, Reese said, “How can we keep digging into this and stay out of trouble with Nick Folbeck?”
“Sick leave,” Julio said. “As long as I'm on sick leave, I'm not officially investigating anything. Call it personal curiosity.”
“That won't hold up if we're caught at it. Cops aren't supposed to have personal curiosity in a situation like this.”
“No, but if I'm on sick leave, Folbeck's not going to be worrying about what I'm doing. It's less likely that anyone'll be looking over my shoulder. In fact, I sort of implied that I wanted nothing to do with anything this hot. Told Folbeck that, given the heat on this, it might be best for me to get away for a few days, in case the media pick up on it and want me to answer questions. He agreed.”
Reese got to his feet. “I better call in sick, too.”
“I already did it for you,” Julio said.
“Oh. Okay, then, let's go.”
“I mean, I thought it would be all right. But if you don't want to get involved in this—”
“Julio, I'm in.”
“Only if you're sure.”
“I'm in,” Reese said exasperatedly.