“I can’t explain it. But I wish I’d gotten a look at that boy’s marrow myself.”
“You think Adam got the diagnosis wrong?”
“Have to admit, that doesn’t seem likely,” Ben said. “The girl’s bone marrow looks reactive, like it was defending itself against an attack. I can’t imagine Adam confusing that with leukemia. But the similarity between these two cases is too much to ignore. I’m also gonna have Genetics run a chromosome profile on the girl’s tissue to look for CF.”
Luke nodded, but his thoughts were drifting elsewhere. From the moment that Josue Chaca arrived at University Children’s, Barnesdale had been lurking in the shadows of this mystery. The man had thwarted every attempt to investigate the boy’s death.
“Don’t tell anyone about our visit to the coroner,” Luke said. “And if anyone in Immunology or Genetics asks why you want these tests done, make something up.”
“I’m way ahead of you. This time I’m not leaving a trail for Barnesdale or anyone else to follow.”
Ben slowed to a crawl when, ten minutes later, they passed Kolter’s Deli. “I might as well let you off here. Save you a walk from the parking lot.” He let a bus go by, then made a U-turn and pulled alongside the curb in front of the hospital.
The chaos erupted just as Luke opened his door.
A battered pickup truck filled with gardening equipment swerved in front of them, burnt rubber rising from its rear tires as it screeched to a stop. The passenger door flew open and a thin Latino man leapt from the truck with a small boy in his arms.
The boy’s half-naked body was drenched in blood, his head flopped back. Blood was spurting from a deep gash in his right leg.
Another man leapt from the driver’s seat and ran around the front of the truck, yelling, “Ayúdenos, por favor! Mi hijo, mi hijo!” His screams came between gasping breaths.
Luke had already jumped from the car. He grabbed the boy, clasped his hand over the gaping wound, and laid him on the sidewalk.
Ben started running toward the hospital entrance. “I’ll find a gurney and let the E.R. know.”
“Do either of you speak English?” Luke’s gaze shuttled back and forth between the two men. “Can you tell me what happened?”
One of the men mimicked the sound of a motor while holding his hands as though gripping a chainsaw.
The boy was limp, his carotid pulse thready. Luke ripped off his own shirt and shoved it over the wound. The blood instantly soaked through and began seeping around his fingers. He glanced at the truck, saw a rope with a wooden grab-handle hanging over a lawn mower.
Luke jerked his head toward the rope.
The two men ran to the truck and frantically grabbed at things to the right and left of the rope, looking back at Luke for confirmation. On the third try one of them grabbed the rope and got a confirming nod.
Luke drew the cord around the top of the boy’s thigh and wrapped the free end around the grab-handle. He twisted the handle like a corkscrew and a tourniquet took shape around the boy’s leg.
He glanced around, hoping to see a nurse or doctor. What he saw was a growing crowd of bystanders, their faces struggling to find the right expression for their sickened curiosity.
He also saw a black town car idling across the street, its Asian driver staring intently at him.
“Outta the way. Clear a path.” Ben and a nurse appeared on either side of a gurney, with a security guard behind them.
The emergency entrance was around the corner and down the block. The boy would bleed to death before they reached the ambulance bay. They loaded the patient onto the gurney and raced toward the hospital entrance with the guard jogging in front of them to clear a path.
Several onlookers gasped as Luke pushed the gurney through the hospital entrance, his forearms covered in blood. A middle-aged man swooned, his eyes rolling back as he dropped to the floor in front of the security desk.
Luke and his ragtag team sprinted toward the E.R.
Calderon connected a thin cord from his cell phone to the recorder, then pressed the PLAY button. A harmonic flutter distorted the distant-sounding voices:
“It turns out that the coroner had a case with similar lung findings — a Jane Doe case. It was a few months back.”
“A woman?”
“A young girl.”
“Did they ever identity the body?”
“He doesn’t think so. Oh, and by the way, the only similarity with our boy seems to be the lung tissues, so don’t get your hopes up. He was sure their girl didn’t have leukemia. Like I said, it’s a long shot, but I think I’ll stop by and take a look at what they have.”
Calderon pulled the wire from his phone and lifted it to speak. “Could you make out the words?” he asked.
The laser microphone had captured the minute window vibrations caused when sound waves, even whispered words, strike glass. A computer had done the rest, reconstructing McKenna’s conversation with that pathologist by feeding the laser’s return signal through specialized software. It was hardly high fidelity, but it had worked.
“I understood most of it,” his client said. “So, now we know what happened to that girl.”
She had been the only test subject who was unaccounted for, and while it seemed obvious that she might have crossed into the U.S. from Tijuana, Mexico — where the local police had found her parents’ bodies — Calderon’s men had failed to pick up her trail.
“It can’t be a coincidence — the girl ending up in L.A.,” Calderon said. “Tartaglia probably had something to do with her getting here.”
It annoyed him that he hadn’t thought to ask the Tartaglia woman about their stray test subject.
After a medical examiner in Tijuana had contacted Guatemalan Health Ministry officials — one of whom was on his client’s payroll — about two deceased persons with Guatemalan identifications, Calderon had dispatched a team to retrieve the bodies and search for the girl. The local Mexican officials were only too happy to release the disease-ridden corpses to the custody of his men, who were carrying IDs and paperwork furnished by their mole in the Health Ministry. Before returning to Guatemala, his team had spent a week looking for the girl before finally deciding that the trail had gone cold.
“McKenna and that pathologist were at the Coroner’s Office this morning,” Calderon said.
“Ironic, isn’t it — that Dr. McKenna led us to the girl?”
“I’m telling you, McKenna and that pathologist are too persistent. They’re gonna keep pushing this until we stop them.” Calderon worked to keep the emotion out of his voice. His had to be the words of a dispassionate professional.
“I’m afraid you’re right.”
Calderon hadn’t felt this kind of rush since he buried a knife in the neck of the German banker, the one whose house his mother had cleaned, the one whose bed his mother had shared — though not of her choice. He was twelve years old at the time, and though his mother had never told him, Calderon knew that he was killing his father.
He fingered the scarred remnant of his left ear. The piece he’d lost in that struggle had always been a source of pride, his rite of passage into manhood.
“How do you propose that we handle this?” his client asked.
His client had an unhealthy need to meddle in things he knew nothing about. “Leave that to me.” Calderon clenched his fist and watched the veins in his forearm fill with blood.
“We need to do this in a way that doesn’t draw attention to ourselves,” his client said. “Let’s give the police something else to focus on. Here’s what I want you to do…”
“Here.” Ben tossed a towel to Luke.