Undone (9 page)

He had, by then, completed several close readings of
Lessons from My Daughter
, a book that offered a cornucopia of personal information highly useful to any man setting out to perpetrate a hoax upon its unwary author. For instance, it was from Ulrickson’s book that Dez learned that Maddy took a nap at three each afternoon (“a pattern so regular you could set your clock by it,” Ulrickson helpfully wrote), and that her bedroom lay one door beyond the bathroom in a hallway off the living room (a fact Ulrickson unwittingly divulged by describing his daily ritual of waking Maddy at three-thirty by tiptoeing “down the front hall, past the bathroom,” then entering the room and kissing her, “like Prince Charming,” on the forehead).

Before climbing from the car, Dez donned the ACE Hardware cap he’d found in the trailer, slipped on a pair of mirrored aviators and grabbed the toolbox.

His cover story about testing furnaces gained him easy entry, and after a five-minute sojourn in Ulrickson’s pleasantly cool, if cobwebby, basement (where he flipped through a few
National Geographic
s he found on a dusty shelf), he went back upstairs, stated his need for a bathroom and was duly pointed down the hall. From there, it was child’s play (literally) for him to dodge into Maddy’s bedroom, where the girl lay sleeping on her back, a soft snore coming through her parted lips.

During his time on the Innocence Project, Dez had seen countless sample-takers perform DNA swabs on prisoners. He moved with practiced ease, pulling on a pair of rubber gloves (hidden in his capacious coverall pockets), then easing open a package of regulation swabs. He extracted one, inserted it carefully into the child’s open mouth and scraped lightly the inside of her cheek. He collected four specimens, which he deposited, one after another, into a paper envelope (always paper, never plastic, since moisture builds up in plastic and destroys the sample). As he worked, Dez marveled at Ulrickson’s accuracy in describing his daughter as an unusually heavy sleeper. Only in the most halfhearted way did Maddy, at one point, snuffle, groggily open her eyes, bat weakly at Dez’s hand, then subside back into thick oblivion.

His task completed, Dez slipped into the adjacent bathroom and flushed the toilet (for aural verisimilitude). Unable to resist the opportunity for a little gratuitous fun, he had thought to
compliment Ulrickson on his preposterous Bannister mysteries—a series that dutiful Dez (for research into his victim’s habits of mind) had forced himself to read. Ulrickson’s blushing delight at this praise nearly caused Dez to burst out laughing, but he mastered himself. A delightful coda to a most successful mission!

Indeed, the only element of the plan that failed to go precisely as Dez had visualized it in advance was the unexpected presence in the girl’s bedroom of Ulrickson’s wife, whom Dez had discovered sitting in her wheelchair beside the sleeping child. Her staring eyes and the soft susurration of her breathing gave him quite a turn at first. But he knew that the unfortunate creature was unable to speak, cry out, move or otherwise communicate, and thus she posed no threat to him. Indeed, as a kind of joke, he even took the time, during his ministrations over Maddy, to raise a gloved index finger to his lips and whisper, “Shhh!” A dangerous little jape, to be sure, but one too good to pass up.

F
rom Ulrickson’s house, Dez drove straight back to JFK and caught a return flight to Vermont. There, he picked up a new rental car and drove, through a sudden downpour, to nearby Newport. Arriving at nine in the evening, he checked into the Jack Pot, a casino-themed motel with small but tidy rooms arranged around a central cement courtyard. The “adult” offerings on the Spectra Vision were, alas, precisely that, so Dez had to content himself with an hour or two of teen sitcoms on Nickelodeon before turning in. At eight the next morning, after an unexpectedly solid and refreshing sleep, he rose, showered, donned a freshly laundered shirt, then took from his overnight bag the one good suit he still possessed from his days as a lawyer: a black wool
number that was, truth to tell, a little out of date now—jackets and pants had narrowed considerably in the last few years, and no one was doing three buttons anymore; but it would have to do. Skipping breakfast (he couldn’t have choked down a single bite), he set out, on foot, through a crystalline, storm-polished May morning, for the G-Tek Clinic, three blocks away.

It proved to be a narrow storefront sandwiched between a nail salon and a check-cashing establishment. Before entering, he flipped open the satchel that hung from a strap over his shoulder and peered inside. Everything was in readiness. He stood for a moment, breathing deeply, steadying his nerves for the task ahead. Then he pushed in through the clinic’s glass doors.

Beyond a set of armchairs grouped around a low table piled with dog-eared magazines was a reception desk—a long counter shielded by a sliding glass window—behind which a heavyset African-American woman was trying, surreptitiously, to consume a tuna sandwich. She looked at him quizzically as he approached, then held up an index finger, bidding him to wait until she had swallowed her food. She did this, then wiped her lips with a paper napkin.

“Innocence Project, right?” she said. “How long has it been?”

Dez began to think that perhaps Providence was on his side. He had no memory of ever having set foot in this particular clinic. But then, he’d visited a lot of DNA testing centers, four years ago, when working with the Project. “Ages,” he said. “I moved out of state for a while, but now I’m back.”

She screwed up her face. “Rizzoli—or
Dizoli
?” she said. “Am I close?”

“Amazingly close,” Dez said. “Dezollet—Russell. Everyone calls me Dez.”

“That’s it—Dez!” she said. She looked at the appointment calendar on her desk. “I don’t know if I’ve got you down for today …”

Dez said that he did not have an appointment. But could he see Mr. Ames?

“Coming right up,” the woman said, grabbing her phone and punching the intercom button. “Dunc?” she said. “Lawyer from Innocence to see you.” She released the button and said, “You can take a seat if you like.”

Dez, feeling considerably more relaxed, sat at the table and dug through the magazines, selecting a
Teen Vogue.
He studied an advertisement for a retro hippy-themed clothing company that featured a photograph of a girl of early high school age dressed in a tiny lace dress, thigh-high white knit socks and cork-soled platform sandals. A mass of teased blond hair framed her sullenly pouting face. He thought about sneakily ripping out the page for inclusion in his “files,” but just then a tall, muscular man in a medical smock, jeans and white running shoes stepped out from behind the reception desk. Dez rose, using the magazine as a fig leaf to conceal the accident of physiology that made standing to his full height difficult. The man, who seemed to notice nothing of Dez’s momentary discomfiture, introduced himself as Mr. Ames. Dez stared, puzzled, at the man’s beefy face and weight lifter’s neck upon which the tendril of a spiky tattoo was just visible, peeking up from the collar of his smock. The man was peering at Dez with similar puzzlement. Then he smiled.

“Hold it,” Ames said. “Don’t tell me. Dex. No—Dez! Right?”

Dez told him that he was correct.

It was all coming back. Four years ago, Dez had spent a day driving around from prison to prison, halfway house to halfway house, in Vermont’s northeast kingdom with Ames, taking samples from potentially innocent inmates and ex-cons. Back then, Ames had been the new man on the job at G-Tek. An amiable if not too bright guy, a motorcycle enthusiast who had, grudgingly, switched from a footloose life as a part-time house painter (which paid just enough to keep him in gas money for his secondhand Triumph) to a nine-to-five gig as a phlebotomist when he got married and had twins. Yes, Dez remembered Ames quite clearly now, the hulking, henpecked husband who, by his early thirties, had already felt the last dregs of his youth draining out of him.

“Promotion?” Dez asked, pointing to the Supervisor badge on Ames’s smock.

Ames shrugged. “If you want to call it that,” he said.

Dez asked if they might speak for a moment in private.

“Hell, yeah,” Ames said. He gestured, beckoning Dez behind the reception desk. They went down a short hall and into an empty examining room. Ames looked a little surprised when Dez stepped around him and closed the door behind them.

Dez decided to dispense with the small talk. There was really no point. Ames would either go for it or not. Everything depended on the next few seconds.

“I’m not here as a representative of the Innocence Project,” Dez began. “I’m strictly on my own. I’ve got a proposition for
you. It doesn’t involve a death row case; no one’s life will be jeopardized, no murderer or rapist will go free. It’s not even a criminal matter. It’s nothing to trouble your conscience over—just the opposite. If you’re willing to help out, you’ll actually make one young woman’s life a good deal better.”

Ames looked at Dez expectantly, as if Dez were about to burst out laughing and announce that he was kidding. From what Ames could remember, the lawyer was a bit of a joker. But whatever he saw in Dez’s expression convinced him otherwise. “Sorry,” Ames said, “I don’t think I’m following.”

“Look,” Dez said, “you’ve got two kids, right?”

“Three now,” Ames said joylessly.

“Congratulations!” Dez said. “But that must get expensive?”

“Listen,” Ames said, his tone now edged with some bitterness and impatience, “what’s this about?”

“I need a favor,” Dez said. “And I bet you could use some extra money.”

Dez was at a clear advantage. He had met a lot of phlebotomists during his time with the Innocence Project, and he’d talked with them about the job; the rest of his knowledge he had filled in, recently, on a Sayer’s Cliff Public Library computer, on the Internet. He knew, for instance, that certification in the field required only a high school education, forty classroom hours of instruction in basic anatomy at a community college or vocational school, and three weeks’ training and practice in drawing blood and taking cheek swabs. Current starting salary: twenty-four thousand a year. After ten years, the ambitious phlebotomist could hope to command the top pay in the
field: thirty-two thousand—thirty-five if you rose to supervisor, like Ames. Dez believed that every man had his price. A phlebotomist’s could not, he reasoned, be especially high. Especially when the man, like Ames, was trying to support a family of five on thirty-five grand a year. In the otherwise ironclad chain-of-custody safeguards, phlebotomists were the weak link. Dez had always known this and, with his penchant for practical jokes and schemes and scams, had stowed that knowledge away in some secret recess of his brain, in case it came in handy one day. It was coming in handy now. Or so he hoped.

He reached into his satchel and pulled out a pile of cash bound with a rubber band—five thousand dollars in twenties, which made a not-unimpressive stack. He dropped it on the examination table. It was everything Dez had had left in the bank.

“That’s five grand,” he said. “That’s more than the extra money you get paid for being supervisor. Except you don’t have to pay taxes on this, and it’ll take you five minutes to earn. Instead of a year.”

Ames looked at the money, then back at Dez. “Um,” he said. “Go on.”

“Tomorrow,” Dez said, “a young woman will come here to give a DNA sample. A representative of Vermont Family Services will be with her, a man named Stubbs, and a female lawyer, Barnes. You will swab the girl in the normal fashion, but instead of sending the swabs to the lab, you’ll switch them with these.” Dez pulled from his bag the paper envelope containing the four swabs he had taken from Maddy. He put them back in the bag. He looked at Ames. “What do you say?”

Ames stared at the money and licked his lips. Dez saw an idea wink to life in the other man’s mind, stirring glinting points of greed in Ames’s pupils. “If you want to make it ten grand,” Ames said, “you got a deal.”

Dez scooped up the money, put it in his bag and turned to leave. Ames saw disappearing from his life forever the 2004 secondhand Ducati Monster 620 Dark motorcycle that he had fancifully, daydreamily, bookmarked on eBay last week.

He grabbed Dez by the arm. “Hold up,” he said.

T
he next morning, at five minutes to ten, the G-Tek receptionist heard the light jingling of a bell that signaled someone coming through the front door. She saw, approaching, a short, stocky man in an ill-fitting and not especially clean-looking shirt, and a plump middle-aged woman with a salt-and-pepper bob and steel spectacles, dressed in a knee-length blue skirt and jacket. With them was a being that could not have provided a more dramatic example of how the expression of human DNA could differ from individual to individual: a sylph-like young woman in narrow dark jeans and a sleeveless white T-shirt, with waist-length wheat-colored hair framing a serenely pretty, softly rounded face. The pale, pudgy man introduced himself as Mr. Stubbs, and said
that the young woman had an appointment with Mr. Ames. The receptionist picked up her phone intercom and said, “Dunc?” A minute later, a well-muscled man with a Supervisor badge on his smock came from a back room.

Ames’s eyes lit, then lingered for a few seconds, on Chloe, as men’s eyes tended to do, before he recovered and invited the trio back to an examining room. There, he performed the well-oiled ritual: he examined Chloe’s ID, wrote her name and address, the date and the clinic’s details on the DDS collection envelope, put on gloves, then peeled open a package of swabs and—with Stubbs and Barnes looking on—took four samples from Chloe’s mouth, placing each swab in the collection envelope. “Okay,” he said in a slightly louder than normal voice, “that’s all there is to it.”

This was the prearranged signal for Dez, who had been loitering outside in the hall. He burst into the room on a dead run. “Sorry I’m late!” he cried. “Traffic!”

Chloe and Ames made a great show of surprise. Stubbs and Barnes’s shock was genuine. In unison, they turned and glared at the intruder, thus giving Ames ample time to slide the envelope of swabs into the inside pocket of his smock and extract an identical-looking envelope from the same pocket.