Blood Lies (28 page)

“Ben, you don’t look so hot,” Kyle said when I emerged from the bathroom.

I waved it away. “It’s nothing.”

He chuckled. “You’re not one of those doctors who is afraid of your own blood, are you?”

I am getting to be
. “No, but my shirt is a mess.”

“You want one of mine?” he offered.

“I don’t think we’re the same size anymore, Kyle.”

“Guess not.”

“I’d better go home and change.”

Kyle walked me the door. “You sure you’re okay, Ben? You look kind of pale.”

“I’m fine. Everything is just catching up with me.” I turned for the door. “Thanks for hearing me out, Kyle.”

“Any time.”

After leaving his condo, I headed straight to my car. As I pulled out into the street, I couldn’t shake my growing suspicion. I considered finding Alex or Helen to talk over my wild theory, but as if guided, I found myself heading north out of downtown Seattle. I saw Lake Union and turned right onto Fairview Avenue. Two blocks later I pulled into the Ed Grayston Cancer Research Center, one of the world’s pioneer research and treatment centers in the field of bone marrow transplants.

I had been there as a student and a visitor, but I still had to follow the signs inside the huge complex to find the entrance to the bone marrow donor clinic.

I had no game plan as I approached the buxom African-American woman who sat behind the reception desk. The nametag on her powder-blue uniform read
ROWENA
. She looked up from her computer with a welcoming smile.

Knowing that my name was still making headlines in Seattle, I remembered I still had Peter’s license in my wallet. “Rowena, I’m Dr. Peter Horvath.”

“Morning, Doctor.”

“Sorry to bother you, but a patient of mine at St. Jude’s Hospital who was treated at the Grayston Clinic is not doing well.” I shook my head gravely. “Not well at all.”

She rested her cheek against her palm. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“The thing is, I think his condition might be related to his bone marrow transplant. I suspect he might have acquired something in the donor’s blood.”

Her shoulders stiffened. “Yes…”

“I need to know the medical background of the bone marrow donor, but I don’t know who he or she is.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Did you ask your patient?”

“He’s in a coma.” I clenched my jaw in my gravest professional frown. “This might be his last chance.”

She held both palms above her head and waved them frantically. “I’d like to help you, Dr. Horvath. I really would. But you know I can’t. Patient confidentiality comes first. Besides, I could lose my job for showing you privileged information like that.”

I laid a hand on the counter separating us. “Rowena, I would never ask if it weren’t so important. We’re literally talking about a life-and-death situation here.”

“I just can’t.” She rose from her desk. “But I’ll tell you what, Dr. Horvath…I’ll get my manager. If anyone would do it, she might.”

Rowena disappeared into the back room before I could get another word in. I paced in front of the counter as five long minutes passed. Rowena eventually returned, followed by a shorter Asian woman, whose nametag read
SHIRLEY
.

Shirley was grinning as she approached, but halfway to me, her jaw dropped and her smile vanished. “Is this some kind of joke?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

Shirley put her small hands on her hips. “Are you testing us,
Mr
. Dafoe?”

My pulse sped up. “I don’t understand.”

“We would never hand your confidential information away to someone who came in off the street asking for it,” she snapped. “And I don’t appreciate you waltzing in pretending to be a doctor.”

I held out my palms in mock misunderstanding. “Shirley, you’re losing me,” I said, though she was beginning to make perfect sense.

“You’ll have to do better than that.” She wagged her finger at me. “I have a good memory, Mr. Aaron Dafoe. You were here two years ago for donor blood compatibility testing. I wouldn’t forget that. I took the blood myself. It was for your cousin’s bone marrow transplant, isn’t that right?”

The room spun. I wanted to grip the desk.

Shirley’s face clouded with concern. “Are you okay, Mr. Dafoe? Maybe you ought to speak to a doctor. Are you on any…er…medications?”

I turned and stumbled for the door. Despite the ache in my chest, I sprinted down the hall. As soon as I made it outside, the hangover and shock caught up to me. I vomited in the bushes by the front door.

Aaron donated his bone marrow to Kyle
. All the pieces fell into place in one awful instant. A bone marrow recipient would have indistinguishable blood from the donor. Kyle had Aaron’s blood in his veins.

Emily’s crime scene made sudden brutal sense. It wasn’t either of the Dafoe twins’ blood on her wall. The blood was Kyle’s!
But why
?

With my shirt stained and the acidic taste of vomit filling my mouth, I drove the short distance home overcome by emotion. Disbelief gave way to anger. Aaron had given Kyle another chance at life with his own bone marrow. Kyle repaid the gesture by killing him and implicating me in Emily’s savage murder.

I knew I should call Helen immediately, but as the anger boiled over, I hesitated. I couldn’t stomach the thought of waiting for the plodding legal system to catch up with Kyle. I wasn’t sure he would live long enough to face justice. I imagined taking matters into my own hands. I wanted to stare into Kyle’s treacherous eyes right before I killed him.

I pulled into my driveway with my head filled with dark fantasies of revenge. But as I headed for the front door, my emotion gave way to reason. Reluctantly, I decided I would have to leave Kyle to Helen.

I opened my front door and staggered into the kitchen, my stomach flip-flopping. Feeling like I was about to throw up again, I raced for the bathroom.

Halfway there, I froze.

I wasn’t alone
.

Kyle sat and stared at me from the chair in the far corner of the living room. A gun rested in his lap. His face was as placid as ever. “You figured it out, huh?”

My throat burned. Only the certainty that I would be dead long before I got my hands on him stopped me from charging. “How did you know?”

He raised the pill bottle in his hand. From ten feet away, I could see the red smudge on the label. “You left your blood on my bottle.”

I sneered at him.

He smiled. “It really is thicker than water, isn’t it, cuz?”

“Not for you.”

Kyle’s grin widened. “Oh, it is, Ben. That’s what makes my revenge so sweet.”

“
Revenge?
” I stepped closer. “Revenge for saving your life?”

His hand drifted languidly to the gun. Unhurried, he raised it in my direction. “Close enough, Ben.”

I stopped halfway across the floor.

“Look at me, Ben.” He tapped his chest with his free hand. “Do I look like someone whose life has been saved?”

“Aaron gave you his bone marrow!”

“His
tainted
marrow.” Kyle’s face went bluish, and he unleashed a harsh cough as if punctuating his point. “Some fucking doctor you are. You didn’t even notice I’m dying, Ben. And not from the
curable
leukemia I had before.” He patted his chest harder. “That’s cancer. My lungs are full of Kaposi’s sarcoma, thanks to the AIDS your brother gave me.”

“Aaron didn’t know he had HIV before your transplant. They would have tested him before bone marrow donation.”

Kyle sighed. “And yet here I am, dying of AIDS.”

“When a person first gets infected, there’s a six- to eight-week window when he doesn’t seroconvert, and will still test negative for HIV even though it’s in his blood.”

“Lucky me,” he sang.

I scoured my brain for an idea of how to get to him before he could shoot me. “So basically you killed Aaron for trying to save your miserable life.”

“It wasn’t miserable back then, Ben,” Kyle said pleasantly. “Besides, it wasn’t just because of AIDS that I killed Aaron.”

“What else?” I muttered through gritted teeth.

“Aaron fucked up my Whistler deal.”

“
Your deal?
What about Philip Maglio?”

“I own Maglio!” The remark set off another spasm of coughs. He caught his breath, waving the gun at my head. “NorWesPac was nothing before me. I built an empire with Maglio as the front man. And while I’m fighting for my life in hospital, your brother threatens to bring down that empire because of some easy lay named Jenny and a few pathetic pangs of conscience.”

I fought off the rising fury, desperate to buy time.

Kyle shook his head. “Your brother was always content to be a low-level pot smuggler, even though all the real money was in designer drugs. Then, after ruining Whistler, he tried to pull out of our business while I was most vulnerable.” He held up a palm as if his rationale made perfect sense. “
That
was unforgivable.”

I knew the only way to distract him was to keep him talking. “And Emily?” I said, surveying the room.

“Putting aside dear Emily’s role in fucking up my Whistler deal…” Kyle grunted. “I knew Aaron didn’t use needles. Since the three of you had such a creepily close relationship, when I heard Emily was HIV-positive, I just assumed she had infected Aaron in bed.”

“They were never involved,” I said hoarsely.

“Who knew his other bitch, Jenny, had AIDS? What are the chances?” He shrugged and smiled as if reminiscing over a humorous misunderstanding. “I guess that’s why Emily stuck to her story even while J.D. held her and I was going at her with the knife.”

It took every shred of my restraint not to lunge for him. “And me?”

“You, Ben.” He shook his head slowly. His features darkened. “You are the reason I’m dying.”

“
Me?
”

“If you hadn’t been too fucking high and mighty to give a sample of your blood, then you would’ve been the perfect bone marrow donor for me. I could have had your clean blood instead of Aaron’s crap.”

“Remember?” My hand tightened into a fist. “I was in Boston taking an ultrasound course. By the time I got back, you had already found your match.”

“Don’t give me your bullshit. If you gave a rat’s ass, you would’ve come back sooner.” The gun trembled in his hand.

“Christ, you’re so warped!”

“Warped? I think this all makes perfect sense, Benjamin,” he whispered in the exact tone and cadence of my anonymous caller.

Though I knew it had to be him, my jaw still dropped as I connected the voice to the face. “How did you make those calls from Canada?”

“I didn’t. Ever since we set up shop north of the border, I’ve kept a separate Vancouver-based cell phone. Tricky, huh? I’m calling you from downtown Seattle, and your caller ID reads Canada!”

“All of this just to set me up?”

“I wanted you to feel
my
panic and helplessness before you went down.” His face relaxed into another smile. “I even wrote you a letter. After you were convicted and my bones cremated, I was planning to have it sent to you. It was too cryptic to have been much use to your lawyers, but you would’ve understood. The thought of you rotting in your cell knowing that I’d set you up has kept me warm at night.”

“Then why did you help me flee Seattle?”

“To string it out. Give you the same false hope I was given. I knew I could turn you in at any moment. Besides, it made you look even more guilty when you fled.” His laughter turned into another cough, and his face went dusky.

Next coughing fit and I make my move
.

“The joke is you kept pulling phantom suspects out of thin air.” He chuckled again. “I never set out to make you think Aaron was still alive. You can thank that retard, J.D.! Maglio’s right-hand man. The idiot couldn’t pull off the
one
simple task of getting rid of your brother’s car after we dumped his body. Instead, J.D. abandons the car half-burned with a trunk full of Aaron’s blood!” He shook his head. “I’m glad I put J.D. out of his misery. The fool didn’t even notice I’d turned on him until after I’d cut open his windpipe.” He shrugged. “I guess I should thank J.D., because it worked out better than I could’ve planned, sending you on one wild-goose chase after another.”

“With Drew Isaacs’s help?”

“Yeah.” Kyle nodded. “That was brilliant, huh? Feeding into your delusion that Aaron was still alive.” His smile faded. “Then Isaacs over-played his hand. He should’ve never mentioned HIV. And he had no business attacking you. I told him to leave that for me.” He sighed. “If it makes you feel any better, I think my Indo-Canadian partners have already taken care of him. I let them know Drew was cheating them for the past three years on the border tunnel.”

I inched forward, biding my time for a sign of an impending coughing fit. “I take it you’re not as religious as you made out?”

“What the fuck has God ever done for me, except give me one illness after another?” he snapped. “I never bought that bullshit the Bible-thumpers piled on me in hospital, but I did recognize a good cover story when I saw one.”

“Cover?” I said, anxious to keep him talking.

“
God
gave me a way out.” His eyes glowed. “As a ‘convert,’ the cops left me alone while I passed out pointless pamphlets and clean needles to the junkies. The joke is, I was passing the crap out to the people who were buying
my
drugs!”

“Would’ve made your parents proud, wouldn’t it?”

“It would have been fucking brilliant. I could’ve walked away with tens of millions in a couple years.” He raised the gun higher. “But thanks to the Dafoe twins, it was all for nothing.”

I was near enough that I needed only one more good cough to pounce, but I sensed our conversation was winding down. Desperate, I reached for clichés. “You don’t think you’re going to get away with this now, do you? If so, you’re even sicker than I thought.”

“I don’t have to get away with anything. Whether in jail or here, I’m too ill to enjoy my last few months.” He cleared his throat. My leg muscles tightened, ready to spring. “But at least I will get the pleasure of putting a bullet in your head before I go.”

He stood to his feet and steadied the gun. His face started to tighten again, and I saw the signs of the impending coughing fit.

Just as my toes flexed to move, a voice made me freeze. “Hello, Kyle.”

Kyle broke into a welcoming grin. “Rick! Good to see you, buddy.”

My stomach plummeted. Rick had to be Kyle’s partner.
This is how it ends
, I thought.

“Drop the gun, Kyle,” Rick said, surprising me.

I glanced to my right. I could see at the edge of the doorway Rick’s head from the eyes up, his arm raised and his gun targeting Kyle.

“Drop the gun!” Rick repeated.

The room stilled. Kyle stared at Rick, his gun still pointed at my head.

“Last chance, Kyle,” Rick said.

Kyle nodded slowly and his hand relaxed. “Okay, Rick, okay. I’m putting it down.” His hands lowered slowly. Partway to the ground, the gun barrel suddenly jerked back up to eye level. I felt the breeze rush by my ear and then I heard the gunshot.

Two crisp blasts replied from beside me. Kyle clutched his chest and toppled backward, collapsing into the chair. Eyes still open, he stared at me for a long moment with his gun dangling from his hand. Then it fell to the ground with a quiet clatter.