Life Sentences (17 page)

"No." She shook her head.
"No way. He's lying."

"Daisy. Even if it turns out
not to be Anna… you realize that some other mother or sister wants to
find their loved one. Do it for them, if not for yourself."

She fell silent, and he watched
this new thought worm its way through her consciousness. He knew that
she would cooperate. She was a good person. He felt like a complete
asshole, taking advantage of her goodness like that.

The following morning, Daisy found
herself tromping along a dirt trail worn down by foot traffic, the boots
of at least twenty law officers kicking up dust in front of her. They paused
at the crest of a hill to observe the mountains and ocean in the distance.
She could see the high-rises of Hollywood from here and was glad she'd remembered
to bring her insect repellent. The deerflies were thick and left painful
bites. Now the group headed down a gently sloping hill, where the chaparral
grew over the trail in places, and continued past a firebreak down the
right-hand side of the canyon. At the head of this grim procession, Roy
Gaines moved easily, a man supremely comfortable in his own skin. His
shoulders were thrown back and his orange jailhouse jumpsuit looked
freshly pressed. She was too tired to hate him. Too tired to fear him. She
just wanted it to be over with. Halfway down the canyon, they followed a
horseshoe bend in the trail and crossed a dried
creekbed
into a wild meadow ringed with pine trees. Gaines launched a
loogie
of bacteria-laden saliva into the grass and
said, "Can I have a cigarette?"

They stopped on a slight rise near
the dried-up
creekbed
, where the plants were
struggling to grow out of the baked soil, their leaves interlaced with
spider-webs. The sun was blazing hot, and the rocks at their feet were
stratified from untold freezes and thaws. Detective Tully put away the
map he'd been marking with a pencil and took out a pack of cigarettes.

"Be right back." Jack left
Daisy's side to powwow with Tully, and she felt abandoned and adrift. She
couldn't see the prisoner's eyes behind his mirrored glasses, but she
sensed that he was watching her.

Gaines drew thoughtfully on his
cigarette while the rest of the men stood around talking. The hairs on
the back of Daisy's neck prickled as she noticed the smoke unfurling
from his nostrils, those mirrored glasses reflecting her miniature
form back at her. "Even if you find a cure," he said in a low, steady
voice, "it won't bring your brother back."

She gave a convulsive start.

"Meanwhile, where'd your life
go?"

She felt the shock reverberating
down to her fingertips.

"I bet you spent half your life
with your head in a book," he continued, his calm voice tearing at
her composure. "You can cure a mouse, Daisy. But what about a human
being? Do you honestly think you'll achieve that in your lifetime?"

Jack strode over and slapped the
cigarette out of Gaines's hand, then stomped on it hard. "Shut the
fuck up," he said.

"Chromosome 4. C-A-G repeated
a hundred times," Gaines said, still watching her. "That's destiny,
right? That's fate."

"Whatever you have to say, you
say to me," Jack insisted.

"Daisy knows what I'm talking
about."

Jack gave an animal growl and shoved
the prisoner, who stumbled backward into the weeds.

"Hey!" Tully said.
"Jack. C'mon."

Daisy's heart folded in on itself.
The sequence C-A-G, repeated over and over, was the gene on chromosome
4 responsible for Huntington's disease. If this gene repeated thirty-five
times or less, you'd be normal. Any higher than that, and you'd die from a
disease that took your mind before it slowly killed your body.

"Fucking animal," Jack
spat.

The prisoner's face showed no reaction.

"C'mon, Jack," Tully said.
"Let it go."

He stood in the clearing with his
hands fisted.

Tully knelt down to pocket the
butt, and the men formed a tense procession and headed back into the woods.

Jack lagged behind until he rejoined
Daisy's side. "You okay?" he asked, his ice-blue eyes full of concern.

"Fine." She was quivering
like a mouse. "What did he mean by that?"

"He's just trying to rile
you."

"Why? What's the point?"

"Do you want to stop? Because
we can put an end to this charade right now."

Her mouth grew defiant.
"No."

"Are you sure?"

"I don't want him to think he
can intimidate me."

"Good for you. Screw him."

Beneath the graceful oak trees were
boulders the color of thunderclouds. There were indentations in some
of the rocks where Native Americans used to grind their acorns. The pestles
would be buried in the ground, long abandoned.

"C-A-G repeated a hundred
times." She turned to Jack. "He's talking about the gene for Huntington's
disease. I wrote about it in my article on genes and destiny. It's one
of the articles you found on Anna's computer."

"Genes and destiny?"

"Our genes determine everything
from hair color to eye color, but what we do in our lives also affects
the way our genes perform. Heart disease is a good example. Smoking,
stress, high blood pressure… all these things can contribute to the advancement
of the disease. On the other hand, Huntington's is an example of how
one gene can literally seal your fate. Once you have Huntington's,
it doesn't matter what your lifestyle is. You can quit smoking, quit
drinking, start an exercise program… it won't make a bit of difference.
Nothing's going to help you. Most human diseases are more complex than
that, but if you're unlucky enough to have the gene for Huntington's,
then sadly enough, biology is destiny."

"So what's his point?"

"I don't know. But it sounds
like he doesn't believe in gene therapy."

"You can cure a mouse, but
not a human being?"

"Exactly."

"Is that true?"

"We've had our share of setbacks,
Jack. We've still got a long way to go, but gene therapy has already been
used to cure human beings. It works on bubble babies… children born
with such deficient immune systems they have to be isolated inside a
plastic bubble or they'll die."

"What about
Stier-Zellar's
?"

"The results have been remarkable
so far… in mice."

He nodded. As they trudged along,
he seemed to be contemplating something. "Exactly what is gene therapy
anyway?" he finally said.

"It's when a healthy gene is
inserted into the body so that it can proliferate and repair any serious
genetic defects. That's the theory anyway. Usually, you clone a gene
using a bacterium. The gene is spliced onto the bacterium's DNA, so
that every time the bacterium reproduces, it makes an exact copy of itself.
Bacteria multiply so rapidly that billions of copies can be produced
very quickly. You can also use polymerase chain reaction. The weird
thing is, all living creatures share the same genetic code. So the genes
from one species can be expressed in another."

"That is fucking weird."

"With
Stier-Zellar's
,
you need a viral vector system in order to transport the genes into the
brain cells of a human being. We plan on introducing healthy genes directly
into the brains of our patients using a real or synthetic virus that
will infect the neurons and express the normal human gene that these
children lack."

"How successful do you think
you'll be?"

"Nobody knows. Results are unpredictable.
For example, they've managed to implant in mice the gene that makes
jellyfish glow. And guess what? The mice glow. But they tried it with monkeys
and failed. The monkeys didn't glow."

"Mice that glow?"

She nodded. "Talk about giving
science a bad name, huh? You don't know whether it's a miracle or a sign
of the apocalypse. But it is science. Good or bad."

A few yards past another firebreak,
the trail led down the side of the canyon, and one by one they skidded toward
the bottom, their feet kicking up sand and gravel. Daisy banged her elbow
on one of the rusty metal pipes that were propping up the eroded hillside
and could feel a sharp throbbing in her arm as she tried to make sense of
it all. Anna had obviously told Gaines about her work with
Stier-Zellar's
disease. He'd read her article on Huntington's
and seemed to know enough about genes to discuss certain details. Her
sister had known Roy Gaines for as long as eight months, which meant that
the timeline went like this: Anna moved to L.A. last June, met Gaines in
August, quit therapy in October and disappeared in February.

It appalled Daisy that a complete
stranger could know so much about her. She wondered what other secrets
Anna had told him. Did he know about Mr. Barsum, for instance? It made
her feel dirty, as if somebody's finger were dragging across her face.

They found the trail again and
pushed deeper into the woods, where the towering pines grew so thick in
places that the sun was almost completely swallowed up. You could barely
make out people's faces in this false dusk. Daisy brushed against a plume
of sagebrush, and it released its aromatic scent into the air. The footpath
wove steeply downhill through a span of kindling-dry cedars that were
spread across the slope.

"Okay," Gaines said as
they reached the bottom of the canyon. "There it is."

They banked down an erosion ditch
and came upon a grave site that was partially hidden from view, covered
under rocks and dead pine branches. Daisy stood a few yards back, her
worst fears crowding in on her.

"I'll have one of the officers
take you back to your motel," Jack said.

"No," she told him.
"I want to stay this time."

His tone was skeptical. "I
don't think so."

"I need to honor whatever
it is she's been through."

"All right. Just don't sue me
later."

She stood shivering in the shade
of the tall trees while the officers got out their emergency shovels and
began to dig. As their blades bit into the dirt, a small cloud of flies
puffed up. One of them landed on her arm, and Daisy frantically brushed
it away. She felt an alarming palpitation as the golden-brown dust rose
up and shimmered in the air.

The grave was fairly shallow, and
soon they'd uncovered a body. Jack snapped on a pair of latex gloves
and scooped some of the dirt off the mummified face. The rubbery nose
was mashed to one side, and the puttylike mouth was frozen in a snarl. Daisy
stared uncomprehendingly at that unrecognizable face. The short,
curly white hair didn't belong to her sister. "Oh God," she whispered.

"What?"

She took a staggering step back.
"Look at her hair."

"Fuck." Jack stood up.
"Get him out of here!"

Daisy caught the prisoner's eye,
his face narrow and expressionless. "Why are you doing this to
me?" she screamed.

"Because," he told her as
the officers led him roughly away, "you should know the truth."

"What?"

"Only you," he said.
"I'll only talk to you!"

And she fell into a black hole so
dense, nothing could escape from its gravitational pull.

The first thing Jack surrendered
was his gun. Next he signed a waiver stating that he absolved the psychiatric
prison of any responsibility in case he was held hostage or killed. He
handed the waiver back to the guard, and the steel blast doors opened
with a mechanical whir. He walked inside, where another armed guard
escorted him down the wide, unfriendly corridor toward the conference
room set aside for lawyers and their clients just off the main cellblock.
The uniformed guard with the bullet-shaped head slid a perforated
key-card through an electronic trough, and the steel-plated door snapped
open.

The conference room was narrow
and claustrophobic, with double bars on all the windows, a bolted-down
table and chairs, and the kind of flat bright lighting you'd find in a supermarket.
"There's the panic button," the guard said, pointing at the
steel-plated buzzer panel next to the room's only exit. "If you need
me, just press it."

Jack nodded. He understood perfectly
well that he would be left alone with the prisoner, unarmed and unobserved.

Roy Gaines was facing arraignment
on charges of first-degree murder in the deaths of Colby
Ostrow
,
Katja
Webb and now his
latest victim, Irma
Petropoulous
, the elderly
woman who had disappeared from her De Campo Beach home over a year ago.
Jack's first missing person. The attorney appointed to represent Gaines
had asked the court to suppress the arrestee's initial confession,
due to the fact that the attorney hadn't been present at the time of said
confession, ignoring the fact that his client had repeatedly waived
his rights to counsel and had even signed a waiver to that effect. Fortunately,
the judge rejected the attorney's request, and Roy Gaines had been
transferred to Francois-Giroux Prison for psychiatric testing in order
to determine his competency to stand trial.

Now Jack took a seat and waited
with a readiness bordering on agitation. After a few minutes, two armed
guards ushered the suspect into the conference room and sat him down
in the only other chair. Gaines wore
hornrimmed
glasses and a black T-shirt under the standard orange jumpsuit, his
hands cuffed to a waist chain. He sat passively while the guards did a
quick check of the room for contraband, then locked the door behind
them.

Jack frowned. Seated in front of
him was a sociopath, a man who knew the difference between right and
wrong but who killed for deeply selfish and malevolent reasons.
"You lied to me," he said calmly, belying the tension inside
of him.

Gaines didn't respond.

It was as quiet as a block of ice
in here. Shafts of sunlight slanted through the prison-bar windows, striping
the floor. The space between bars was about the width of a human forearm.
The entire facility had been designed to drive a grown man crazy; it
was as dull and functional as a public school building, only there would
be no escape from the boredom.

Gaines looked older than his thirty-four
years, prematurely aged but still physically imposing with his powerful
shoulders and ripped upper
pecs
, his monster
triceps and his greasy black hair, each inky strand as thick as piano wire.
The cement walls had been painted a mind-numbing beige, and Roy Gaines
sat staring at them.

"Hello?" Jack said angrily.
"You still with me?"

The prisoner didn't seem to be
listening.

"You tried to engage the victim's
sister in conversation," Jack said. "You lied about the corpse's
identity. You've broken all the rules."

Gaines just floated there in front
of him. Sitting and staring.

"So what's your game plan,
Roy? Huh? You enjoy killing people, that's obvious. You like playing
mind games. What else?"

This elicited a thin smile.
"I didn't kill anyone."

"No, of course not. You just
told us where the bodies were buried, right?"

"I shouldn't be in here. I'm
an innocent man."

"We're all fucking innocent,
Roy. Everybody on death row is innocent." Jack gave him a stony look.
"I know exactly what you're doing."

The prisoner's jaw muscles tensed.

"C'mon, Roy, think about it.
Acquittals on insanity pleas are extremely rare, you know that. We'll
find Anna Hubbard's body sooner or later, with or without your help.
We've got tracker dogs out there right now, scouring the woods. Once we find
the body on our own, all bets are off. No more plea bargains. You'll be facing
the death penalty for sure. So unless you decide to cooperate and tell
me where she is right now… unless you show some sort of compassion or remorse,
then I truly can't help you."

He watched Jack with fiat dark
eyes that already seemed set apart from the world. "I'll tell her sister,"
he said.

Jack shook his head. "
Ain't
gonna
happen."

A far-off siren sounded.

"Can I have a cigarette?"
Gaines asked. "In my pocket. I can't reach." He indicated his
helplessness by moving his shackled arms in a limited fashion, the
clunky waist chains rattling against the seat of his chair.

Jack got up and removed a pack of
cigarettes from the prisoner's jumpsuit pocket, then put them on the
table in front of him and sat back down. "Maybe you should quit."

Gaines smiled. In this light, he
had a feral face with teeth like kernels of corn. "Prison is no place
to give up smoking, Detective."

"So tell us where you buried
the body. Point me in the, right direction."

Gaines glanced at the cigarettes
on the table.

"End her sister's suffering.
End her mother's suffering." Jack waited, an eerie silence enveloping
them like a fine spring mist that comes and goes quicker than a daydream.
He noticed he was perspiring lightly. He had yet to see Gaines break a
sweat.

"I need to explain a few
things to her," the prisoner said, shifting in his seat.

"Who? Ms. Hubbard?"

The seconds ticked past.

"
Y'know
,
Roy, we don't need to know why you did what you did. We've already got the
hows
and wherefores. So screw the whys. I don't give a
damn why."

"She will."

In his mind, Jack fed a bullet into
the chamber of his service revolver, aimed it at Gaines's stubborn skull
and pulled the trigger. In reality, he laced his fingers together on the
metal tabletop. "The California death penalty gives you a choice
between gas and lethal injection." He leaned forward. "No
jury's
gonna
buy this insanity crap. Come on,
Roy. You're a big boy. You know that most juries are merciless when it comes
to the insanity defense."

Beneath the glare of the prison
lights, Gaines's boil scars and dog-yellow teeth were prominent, but the
attitude, the arrogance, the false calm, were all part of a carefully
crafted facade, Jack knew.

"Are you even listening to
me? Or should I just shut the fuck up?"

Gaines blinked.

Inhaling deeply through his nose,
Jack said, "Okay, so why'd you agree to see me without a lawyer present?
What's the fucking point of this little
tete-a-tete
?"

"Because," he said,
"you can bring her here. She trusts you."

Jack's trigger finger twitched.
"I should've shot you back when I had the chance," he said.