The Timer Game (36 page)

Doing for Jeanne what Jeanne had done a million times for Grace, making her voice be matter-of-fact and reassuring, a voice of strength and competence. Only she had nowhere to go, no avenue to explore. Dead ends. Dead ends and death.

She pulled out the last clue and read out loud
: “‘
A dusty prize is pointing you—’ Clearly Dusty. And what we learned. ‘Inside the past, inside a cell.’”

She put down the clue. “Folsom? Do you think it’s about that? The interview with Benny Jingelston?” She was trying to pull Jeanne back from the dark place and was relieved when she heard her adjust her mike in the backseat.

“Cell. Maybe a cell phone,” Jeanne offered. “Or it could be that injection that Robert Harling Frieze talked about.”

“And DeeDee Winger. Pass me the charts, okay?”

Jeanne handed them over the seat. The route was following the coastline now, and the beach communities were bright patches of sparkles along the black expanse of water. LAX was off to the right, a string of plane lights coming in, red and green lights on wings.

You can’t engineer something after it’s dead.

The moon suddenly loomed in front of them, thin and curved, floating over a vast, inky ocean. Jeb cut his voice off again, so he could talk to whatever tower was close.

You’re talking about changing something at the cellular level, making it not just compatible, but the same
.

Grace thought about Yin’s back, twitching in brown and white squares.

She was rocked by a small, stunning thought. “Jeanne, tell me again what you did in that lab where you worked. How you got the brown fur to accept a transplant from a white-furred gerbil.”

Jeanne cleared her throat. “Well, when the body’s developing, there’s that tiny window of time when the fetus is figuring out what’s
self.
So we injected bone marrow from the white gerbil into the developing fetus of the brown gerbil and waited, and then Yin was born with an immunity system that recognized cells from Yang as
self
, instead of foreign cells to fight. So later, when we transplanted fur—” She stopped. “Where are you going with this?”

A shelf slid into place in Grace’s mind; the door locked. She felt a burst of adrenaline, followed by calm. “Human fetuses develop along a time table, don’t they? Where the thymus is figuring out what’s
self,
what isn’t.”

Jeanne stared straight ahead at the back of Jeb’s head, a horrified look dawning on her face. “Oh no. You don’t think…”

Grace looked at her. “I don’t know what to think.” She redialed Oscar’s number.

He answered on the first ring, voice weary. “Oscar.”

“Oscar, it’s me again, Grace. The accident he had.”

“What?”

“When Dusty was four. She’d come out to see me, right after I started working CSI. We were at Children’s Beach in La Jolla that day, looking at the seals. And he slipped on the rocks and broke his arm. He had to have surgery at the Center and get pins in it. Do you remember when that was exactly?”

“What? Oh, Grace.” He sounded resigned. “Grace, Anne’s sick, she doesn’t need questions.”

“This could be important, Oscar.”

“How?”

She closed her eyes. “I was pregnant, I remember that. So it was probably late summer, early fall.”

“Wait a minute, you think this could have something to do with—”

“I don’t know what to think, Oscar. But, yeah. I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with what happened to Dusty.”

The silence grew. Finally he said, “They’re in the garage. His medical files.”

She clicked off. The interior of the plane felt cold and she rubbed her hands together trying to warm them.

“Want to tell me what this is?” Jeanne asked.

Grace shook her head, unable to speak. She began ordering the charts just so, lining up the notes she wanted to review:

DeeDee and Fred Winger (miscarried)

Robert Harling Frieze and Terry Frieze (toddler lost to tumors)

Adrian and Richard Bettles Eric gets (successful transplant, perfect match?)

Something bleated and Grace jumped. Jeb flipped a switch and said into his mike, “That’s the cell. Pick it up and press
Talk.”

She did what he said. “Yes?” Grace said into the phone.

“September third,” Oscar said without preamble. “Five years ago, September third, Dusty broke his arm and had it set at the Center for BioChimera. Anything else?”

“Yeah. This is even weirder, but do you remember when Dusty came home from San Diego, seeing a bruise on his back? Or maybe his hip?”

“A bruise.” Oscar grew quiet. “I remember something like that. Yeah, yeah, I do. Annie thought he banged himself when he tumbled down the rocks. Is it important?”

“Yeah.” Grace felt faint. “Yeah, actually, it is.”

She clicked off and stared blankly out the window.

It was easy to see it then, how it worked.

Vacationing four-year-old Dusty Rhodes slipped off some wet rocks while watching seals play in La Jolla and for the first time, Grace wondered if the fall itself had been orchestrated. No matter.

He fell and broke his arm and had surgery at the Center for BioChimera. His insurance was good there at the hospital and they were only minutes away from the Center when the accident occurred, so it made sense to have him treated there. That was five years ago.

It turned out to be hugely important, where he went. Because that same night, three pregnant women came to the Center. There they were injected with an unknown substance.

Not unknown anymore.

It was bone marrow.

Taken out of Dusty. Bone marrow injected into the developing fetuses of three women, injected as an experiment, so the developing fetuses would forever recognize Dusty Rhodes’s cells as
self.
One miscarriage. One toddler died of tumors.

But one kid, Eric Bettles, grew up to be a sickly boy who won the Lotto of medicine: a heart so perfectly matched, he’d never need meds. Perfectly matched because it had been engineered for him. Engineered out of another boy’s cells.

All the time Dusty Rhodes was growing up, riding a bike, learning to play the harmonica, another kid’s frail body was being groomed to accept Dusty’s heart as a perfect match, accept it because their cells had been intermingled in utero.

She stared. Her throat closed. She was falling.

The plane shifted and she realized they were beginning their descent into Montgomery Field. Grace fumbled for her checkbook; looked at the calendar, what the date was, a year ago Sunday. The date Dusty Rhodes went down a road in Iowa, flinging papers on his bike. And never came back alive.

October 23.

Her breath made a rattling sound as she wrote it down. Lining it up, knowing what she’d find.

October 23, one year ago—Dusty Rhodes was kidnapped/killed.

October 23, one year ago—Eric Bettles got a heartin-a-box.

Not a heartin-a-box
.
A heart taken from the chest of a boy.

Her pen clattered to the floor. Nausea rushed over her and she closed her eyes, willing her stomach to calm down.

“Grace?” It was Jeb, in the headphones.

If it was true, then she’d find the same thing one more time.

“Grace, you okay?”

Katie’s ear surgery. The bruise on Katie’s back, after her ear surgery. Right after Katie had disappeared from the room and nobody could find her. Katie’s fussiness and irritability. How she screamed when Grace tried to hold her.

It wasn’t the ear surgery; it was the pain in her back.

Where she’d just had marrow removed.

They’d taken Katie, wheeled her away from post op, punctured into bone marrow, sucked out what was needed.

“They pulled marrow out of healthy children and injected it into developing fetuses, so later, there’d be a perfect match.”

“Excuse me?” Jeb said.

“The neonatal window,” Jeanne cried from the backseat. “Where everything is accepted.”

Not possible. An evil beyond imagining.

This wasn’t the way it looked. It couldn’t be. There had to be an explanation for what she saw.
That’s good
, the voice inside said,
because Hekka Miasonkopna’s got a chart, too
. Grace pawed through the papers and found Katie’s sheet for the day she went into surgery.

She already knew what she’d find. Katie’s ear surgery had been four years before, September 16.

The same day a small, terrified Indian woman named Maria Miasonkopna came to the Center late at night for a second sonogram. A sonogram never recorded on the chart except for a brief notation on the side. A secret sonogram in a secret room.

Grace knew where to look for Katie now.

At the Center for BioChimera, on the pediatric transplant floor, the floor nurse picked up on the fifth ring, her voice out of breath.

“Hekka Miasonkopna’s room? Sorry. Nobody there.”

“Is she in surgery?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Wait. This is important—”

The connection broke.

Chapter 42

All Hallows’ Eve, 11:41 p.m.

Jeb made the approach into Montgomery Field and brought the plane down smoothly as Grace stuffed the charts and loose pages back into her bag. He took off his headphones and motioned for her to do the same.

“You okay?” His eyes were kind and searching under the baseball cap.

She shrugged, unable to speak. “Thanks for the ride. What time do you have?”

He checked his watch. “Exactly nineteen of.” He reached over her and unlatched the door. He glanced back at Jeanne. “I’ll make sure your friend gets home. Take care of yourself, Grace.”

She ran for the car. It was a black sedan waiting out front. Her driver had soft pink cheeks and thick eyelids that made him look sleepy.

He nosed the car into traffic and climbed the familiar road leading to the Center for BioChimera as she tried Mac’s number. He wasn’t picking up. She tried Warren’s number at the Center. Nothing. On impulse, she dug out the number that Thor had given her, the number Opal had used to call her brother. Lee’s private line.

It was disconnected. Fear seized her. She leaned closer. “Can you go any faster?”

“Hold on.” He stomped on the gas as she tried the Center’s main number.

A recorded voice said, “You’ve reached the Center for BioChimera. If you’ve reached this number during normal business hours, the desk attendant has momentarily stepped away…” No, no. She clicked off, thought better of it, let it ring through, listening to the message, punching zero, praying for connection to a real voice.

“Security,” a nasal male voice grunted.

The driver was speeding down Torrey Pines Road now, past the gray blank walls of biotech buildings. “Yes, this is Grace Descanso and—”

“Spell it.”

This was taking forever. “Look, this is an emergency and—”

“Dial nine-one-one.”

“I don’t need nine-one-one. I have to talk to Warren Pendrell. Dr. Warren Pendrell. He’s the CEO, the director of the center—”

“Ma’am, if this is an emergency, hang up the phone and dial—”

Grace cut the connection. The car bumped into the parking lot.

“Which side?” the driver asked.

“Hospital.”

He headed for the Emergency entrance. She unsnapped her seat belt and was out the door the instant the car came to a stop. Bedlam greeted her inside the ER: an entire girls’ basketball team still in uniform, crying and bleeding after what looked like a bus accident; an inert boy dressed as Robin Hood, his mother pressing a towel to a mangled arm; and an elderly man in a Batman mask experiencing what looked like cardiac arrest.

It would take forever to make someone understand, and by that time, Katie would be dead. She pushed through the double doors, flew by a scrub nurse before she could do more than launch a startled protest, and found the elevator. It was stalled on three. She sprinted down the hall to the stairwell and climbed.

It was two more flights up and she pushed herself to move faster, knowing she was physically close to the end of what she had left.

She burst into the bright hall on three, her legs trembling. The first OR was dark. She checked the clipboard on the door. Not Hekka. She raced down the hall and glanced through the octoganal window of the second OR, pulling back as the surgeon flicked a glance her way. The draped patient was a toddler, not a kid Hekka’s age. Maybe they’d hidden her. Maybe Hekka wasn’t in OR at all. She had to be.

Grace slammed through another set of doors. A small desk spilled with charts. A harried intern sat in front of a computer entering data, rising in surprise as she ran past. To her left, a room opened onto a row of cotton curtains surrounding gurneys of patients preparing for surgery. One curtain had been pushed back, revealing a drowsy teen murmuring to his mother. An IV snaked into a pole, the fluid bag almost full. Was Hekka swaddled inside a dim cell in prep? She considered racing down the row, ripping curtains open. She’d do it if it came to that.

A lab coat hung on a hook, next to a red metal crash cart. She slipped on the coat and pushed the cart into the hall, past a nurse and the intern excitedly describing the flash of Grace’s green top as she’d darted past. Grace kept her head down, pushing the cart past a waiting room.

An old man with braids sat inside, whittling a block of wood, a knife in a gnarled fist. He was carving a small figure. An old man. An Indian. He didn’t look at her, his knife taking small nips out of the wood. A small figure of a dancing man glowed in his twisted hands.

Grace retraced her steps. The waiting room was empty except for the old man. She knelt in front of him. “Hekka.”

He stared, eyes cloudy with cataracts.

“She’s yours, isn’t she? A granddaughter, maybe? Where is she?”

How much English did he know? He blinked impassively.

“Understand? I need to find her. This isn’t a heart built for Hekka in the lab. This is a heart they are stealing from another child to put in your Hekka. A child still alive
.
My child.” Her voice broke.