Bad Blood (38 page)

I slept late, and after Ignacia left at 8 a.m., soaked in my bathtub and dressed casually in jeans and a sweater. I wasn’t going to court or meeting with any witnesses today, and I didn’t expect to be in the office for long. I carried a small bag with my ballet shoes and clothes in it, optimistic that I could sneak away early for a few hours of exercise at the barre.

The patrol car was waiting for me in the driveway when I got downstairs at nine thirty on a cool June morning. I was grateful for the week’s end after days scarred by such tragic events.

My cell phone rang just as we pulled onto the southbound FDR Drive at Seventy-third Street.

“Where are you?” Mike asked.

“On my way to the office. And you?”

“Spent half the night again in a warren of subway tunnels filled with homeless men and the other half in something that vaguely resembles a sewer. What does Mattie Prinzer drink?”

“Scotch,” I said. “Some kind of fancy single malt. One of those two-hundred-dollar-a-bottle jobs, if I remember correctly. Why?”

“Well, buy her a six-pack of ’em. She stayed up till dawn with my Q-tip.”

“And the good news is?”

“She’s matched the saliva on the cotton to the blood on Bex Hassett’s zipper.”

I sat bolt upright. “The same DNA? Trish Quillian’s blood is on the sweater her best friend was wearing the night she was killed?”

“Don’t get too excited, Coop. It may not be what you think.”

I was usually the one curbing Mike’s enthusiasm. I’d urge him not to jump the gun, so I thought immediately of the contrary arguments that had to be considered. “I know, I know. The girls were best friends. Trish’s blood could have been left on that sweater some other day or time.”

“It’s not just that—”

“But after more than a decade?” I said. “Don’t you think it’s fantastic just to get the match? Whatever the issue is about when and how the blood got there, the fact is that Trish Quillian is the only person in the universe with that genetic profile.”

“Tell the boys in blue to get you over here to Mattie’s office as soon as possible. There were actually
two
people in the universe with Trish Quillian’s DNA. That’s the first problem we’ve got to deal with. I’ll tell you the other one when you get here.”

Mattie’s small office was tucked away at the end of the hall, past the lab in which forensic biologists sat elbow to elbow at their tables, interpreting data that cooked overnight in the robots — the giant machines capable of running dozens of DNA samples at a time.

“I wanted you to see this for yourself, Alex,” Mattie said.

Mike was pacing behind her; three steps in each direction was all that the space allowed. He looked up as I entered, but didn’t bother to greet me. “The bastard would never have had the chance to escape.”

“What have you got now? I hear you did a brilliant job on Trish Quillian’s gob of spit,” I said to Mattie. Mike was talking to her about Brendan Quillian, and I didn’t understand why.

“That’s old news already, Coop. Get with it.”

“Last week, the night of the blast in the water tunnel,” Mattie said, “we were so proud of ourselves for showing off the mobile lab. Getting the crew up there and having results in less than ten hours.”

“The guys did a great job.”

“I think so, too. From bits and pieces of flesh, they matched the two sandhogs from Tobago to items they found in their lockers and their home.”

“Sorry. I never even focused on those men,” I said. “We’ve all been assuming they were caught in the wrong place at a very wrong time, not that they were the targets of the killer.”

“That’s quite possible. Yes, one had tissues in a jacket pocket in the shed. Cut himself on a piece of metal a day or two before the explosion. The other one was identified from his toothbrush.”

“And then there was Duke Quillian,” Mike said, locking his thumbs in the rear pockets of his jeans.

I frowned and looked at Mike for an explanation. “Don’t tell me he wasn’t down there in the tunnel? He was certainly identified, too. Wasn’t he?”

It was Mattie who spoke. “Yes. Duke Quillian is dead. But the day he was identified, it wasn’t actually done by a DNA analysis of his blood.”

“Why not? I thought…”

Mattie spread the reports in front of her. “For one thing, we had the severed digit,” she said, pointing to an eight-by-ten blowup of the large finger with its ragged edge.

“They just scraped skin cells off the surface of it, and of course, they also had a perfect print to match.”

“Duke Quillian had no record. No fingerprints on file with the NYPD. Mike checked that the first day.”

“Yes, but the union required all the sandhogs to be fingerprinted after 9/11. It was mandated as a security issue, for some of the jobs they had to work on near Ground Zero — rebuilding subway stations and such,” Mattie said. “The prints were delivered to the ME’s office within hours of the blast, so that confirmed his death.”

“All that confirmed,” Mike said, correcting Mattie, “is that it would be a struggle for him to use a rotary phone. It was only one finger.”

Mattie shook her head at Mike. “And the dental records. A piece of Quillian’s skull was picked up at the scene. That fragment was also matched to his dentist’s files.”

“So Duke’s dead, right?” I asked.

“Very dead, Alex,” Mattie said. “And I know we never do things fast enough for Mike, but you’ve got to remember the backlog we have. No one else was reported missing, so we knew we had the deceased — our three victims — identified.”

With the expansion of the capability of DNA to solve crimes — well beyond murders and sexual assaults — the lab was inundated with dozens of investigative requests a day, some of them presenting dozens of samples per case.

“Thousands of pieces of skin and tissue were collected in the debris from the tunnel,” Mattie went on. “The techs have been doing extractions on them as fast as they can, in between all the new work that’s brought in every day. They’ve been running samples in the robots. One of my guys got a result yesterday that had him stymied. It didn’t make sense to him, so he brought it to me to discuss last night, after Mercer left.”

“What didn’t make sense?” I asked.

“This — this anomaly.”

“Anomaly?”

Mike leaned over Mattie’s shoulder. “Yeah, Coop. Anomaly. That’s a scientific expression that usually translates as ‘Detective Chapman, you’re screwed.’ Show her.”

There were pages of reports from the various biologists who had worked on the tunnel samples. With the tip of her pen, Mattie pointed to the profiles that repeated themselves on different test results.

“Here’s Tobagan Number One, as we’ve called him.” His tissue fragments had been identified again and again from remains within the blast site.

She lifted her pen and moved to Tobagan #2, making the same point.

“This,” Mattie went on, “is the genetic profile of Duke Quillian. We obtained it, of course, from the skin cells of the finger that Mike recovered on the first day. It matches skin cells from microscopic pieces of flesh that were in the debris. There’s no question that Duke was blown to bits.”

“Then what’s the anomaly?” I asked.

“You can look at every single blood sample — hundreds of them — that we’ve been running these last two days to wind up the investigation. Not one of them — not one drop of blood — matches the DNA of Duke Quillian.”

“You’ve got the man’s skin, but you don’t have his blood?”

“Exactly, Alex.”

“Can you explain—”

“It turns out there is DNA from a fourth person,” Mattie said, wagging her pen in my face. “A different profile that several techs developed. Something that didn’t match to any of the deceased.”

“But there are no other reports of missing persons.”

“Right, there haven’t been any, and it’s actually much easier than that, Alex. It’s the DNA of a woman in this fourth profile,” Mattie said. “One peak only. Again, there’s no Y chromosome.”

“But there were no women working in the tunnel. It’s bad luck — the sandhogs won’t have it.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Coop,” Mike said.

“The blood in the tunnel,” Mattie said, pushing several pieces of paper toward me. “You can see for yourself what I mean. This profile was sitting on my desk last night, right next to my folder on the Hassett case.”

She slid two pieces of paper together — one from Bex Hassett’s file and the other from the water tunnel evidence — and pointed to the alleles that aligned with each other at thirteen loci within the cell to create a distinctive genetic profile.

“You want to talk anomaly, Coop? The DNA in that blood sample from evidence in Water Tunnel Number Three — it’s a perfect match to the DNA of Trish Quillian.”

The windows in Anna Borowski’s office overlooked York Avenue, the stretch of East Side real estate from the Queensboro Bridge to Seventy-second Street — once tenements — now known as Hospital Row. It had taken us only twenty minutes to get here from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner forty blocks downtown.

“What made you think to call me?” the doctor, whose medical specialty was blood cancers, asked Mike.

He had known Anna for several years, he told me on the ride uptown, from the time Valerie was in treatment. Mike had met his fiancée while he was giving blood at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where Val had undergone extensive chemotherapy, as well as her surgery.

“Bad blood, Doc. You know more about it than anyone in town.” Mike was looking out at the campus of Rockefeller University on the far side of the street. He turned back to the oncologist and flashed his familiar grin. “I figure I’ve given you a few pints of my best stuff. That maybe you’d go undercover for me. Get me a peek at the patient’s chart, at least.”

The tall, handsome woman, dressed in a lab coat, lowered the tortoiseshell frames of her reading glasses from the top of her head and opened the thick sheaf of medical records. “Am I just easy or does that smile work on everyone?” she asked me.

“The perps don’t go for it,” I said. “Most of the rest of us do.”

“Duke Quillian?” Mike asked.

“On the promise your subpoena will follow shortly.”

“You got it.”

She adjusted her glasses and got to work reading the papers in the blue folder.

“Acute leukemia, Mike. His chart begins with the usual symptoms. Fatigue, frequent fevers and infections. Nosebleeds and bleeding gums. By the second or third round of antibiotics, the local doc — a family practitioner in the Bronx — drew some blood to be tested. Got the result, made the diagnosis, and sent Mr. Quillian to us. That’s the way the disease typically presents.”

“Don’t you have to pull all kinds of strings to get into these digs?” Mike asked.

Anna shook her head. “People think that, I guess. Your friend Duke — looks like he had perfectly good insurance coverage from his union. More important than that, there was no medical facility in the Bronx, where he lived, that did transplants in those days. I’m not sure there’s one now. This would be the only logical place for him to wind up.”

The word
transplant
caught my attention. “Duke Quillian had a transplant?”

“That was the only curable method of treating acute leukemia back in the days when he was ill, especially when the patients were as young as this guy.” Anna glanced down at the file. “Mid to late twenties.”

“What’s the process?” Mike asked.

“The patient is typed for the human leukocyte antigen — HLA. And all his family members are typed, too. Did he have siblings, this guy?”

“Yes,” we both said.

“There’s a one-in-four chance of matching a family member,” Anna said. “I’ve had cases with eight children, and none of them match the patient, although a few of them match each other. There’s a second reason we start with family.”

“What’s that?” Mike asked.

“Donating marrow is an extremely painful process. It’s hard to imagine how much it hurts,” Anna said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “When you do it for someone you know and love, it’s got to ease some of that.”

“And if the siblings don’t fit?”

“Then we go to the National Marrow Donor Program. Try to find a match from a volunteer donor.”

“Does it tell you what happened here?” Mike asked, ready to grab the file from Anna’s hand.

“Patient as always, Detective Chapman,” Anna said, glancing at me. “Mike would come in every six months to give blood. He’d expect me to have cured someone before he finished his juice and cookies.”

She skimmed the pages to find the information we wanted. “Yes, Mike. There was a perfect match to one of Duke’s siblings — a sister named Patricia. Seems they refer to her in these records as Trish.”

Mike clapped his hands together and flashed me a victory sign. “So Trish was his donor. Duke ended up with her DNA.”

“Not so fast, Mike,” Anna said. “Yes — and no.”

“I’m sorry to say I’m confused, Doctor. I don’t understand this.”

“Was he in the hospital or not? That’s what I want to know,” Mike said.

“Let me back it up. After the match was confirmed and the surgical date was set, the patient — in this case, Duke Quillian — was admitted to the hospital. Usually, about nine days before the surgery, the chemo treatment begins. The point of that is to kill off all the old bone marrow cells completely — the ones causing the disease. So from that time — Day minus 9 — Duke was right here in Sloan.”

“What’s the surgery involved?” I asked.

“Two procedures are conducted on the same day, but only one was actually surgical. Trish Quillian would have been in the operating room. Two doctors were harvesting her bone marrow.”

I winced. “Harvesting?”

“She’s anesthetized, of course, Alex. Facedown on the table. Holes are drilled in her iliac crest,” Anna said, pointing to her hip. “A lot of them. Two surgeons go into the holes to draw out three to five cc’s of marrow each time. The procedure can require as many as three hundred needles, filling up a container the size of a coffee can. Do you understand how much that is?”

Mike’s expression was grim. “Yeah.”