When Secrets Die (19 page)

Franklin looked at his watch. Too early to call Emma, she'd be driving Blaine to school. He'd call her when he got back from IHOP. And he smiled to himself, thinking about how Ernesto and Cilla had just wandered down to the courthouse and gotten married and gone on with their lives, which might not sound romantic to some people, but sounded pretty close to perfect to him.

Franklin, being Franklin, was unable to eat alone in a restaurant without a briefcase of work. He set the case on the table, top up, so people could not look at him. He usually felt self-conscious in public, and worried that people felt sorry for him because he was by himself, but today it didn't matter. He realized that he was not the kind of man people should feel sorry for. But he did have the briefcase open so he could go over some of his notes. He was trying not to be quite such a workaholic these days. He was more interested in seeing Emma and Blaine (his girls, as he liked to think of them) at the end of the day, and though his job still interested him, it no longer consumed him. This was what his sister had noticed.

Feeling pious, Franklin scraped the scoop of butter off his short stack of pancakes onto a napkin. The waitress set a blue plastic pitcher down on the table beside his orange juice.

“Hot syrup,” she said, and winked.

Definitely flirting. Franklin smiled at her, friendly but discouraging. He slathered syrup on the pancakes, thinking that ever since he'd met Emma, women were noticing him more and more. Before Emma, he couldn't get a second look; how they were falling in his lap. Maybe it was because he was happy and more confident. He just felt good these days. Women probably found that attractive. Or maybe they were intrigued because he didn't notice them anymore, not like he used to, wistfully and covertly. But to Franklin, any woman who was not Emma, was … not Emma.

He cut the pancakes into bite-sized pieces—bite-sized for a man with a big bite. That way he could eat with his right hand and hold the paperwork with his left, without interrupting the flow of food.

Being the state pathologist gave him easy access to pretty much whatever he wanted. Being an MD put him in the brotherhood. Medical doctors were the last holdout—governing themselves like gentlemen, which meant pretty much not governing themselves at all, and always careful not to step on each other's toes. It had its good and bad angles.

Clayton Roubideaux had wisely stored his son's remains with a private lab, which had been happy to comply with Franklin's requests for tissue samples. Roubideaux had carefully given Franklin all possible permissions, and had tied it all up in precisely legal documentation, and Franklin had not told the man that he could have gotten everything he wanted with no permission from the family. It would only have upset him.

Franklin himself was not one of those pathologists who
kept things
. Squirrels, is what Franklin called them in the privacy of his thoughts. He disapproved of the squirrels. He himself was a stickler for family permissions and medical releases, and he had a weary contempt for his colleagues' insistence on collecting tissues, samples, and out-and-out body parts. Oh, yes, they'd argue up one side and down the other about medical science, and the advancement thereof, but in Franklin's opinion, the end did not justify the means, and even if it did, most of the time very little use ever came of these samples. Until the Human Genome Project, which had started a government-sanctioned and -funded genetic gold rush. Until the eighties, when it became legal to use the genetic material of Joe Public and use it without his permission to patent certain genes. Franklin had colleagues who had literally made millions selling the patents to pharmaceutical companies, and the patient had never been notified or compensated. It was
bio-prospecting
and
bio-plundering
, and there were
bio-pirates
trolling the seas of modern medical research.

His colleagues could refer to their “sources” as “carriers of genetic information” or “subjects” or “data sets” or even “gold mines”; but they were still people, whether you reduced them down to the molecular level, or viewed them as a whole,
les corps humain
. Terms like
extracted, harvested, mined
, or
procured
were tossed around by doctors who sounded more like the guys in the agriculture or engineering department than the medical college.

Franklin was well aware how much cadaver tissue found its way into commercial lanes. Doctors, researchers, hospitals, pathologists, funeral directors—everybody was in the game. He knew of obstetricians who harvested eggs and sold them for research on birth control. Knew of incidence after incidence where family members donated organs or tissues for altruistic research, completely unaware that these tissues found their way into cosmetics, and that somebody somewhere was making an enormous profit.

And the police were no better. Putting together their DNA databases “for the good of everybody” to identify criminals. Cops were snatching genetic material left behind on coffee cups, or cigarette butts, and bringing them in as evidence, without the consent or knowledge of the subject. Franklin was just waiting for the mess to make it up to the Supreme Court. Do people own their genetic material? Do they own their genetic material if they're suspected of a crime, or only if they don't want to donate their kidneys?

DNA typing was considered gospel these days. Which wasn't exactly true. The results were only as good as the technician who provided them, and Franklin had seen enough screwups to empty a state prison.

Years ago being a pathologist was the kind of job you didn't like to admit having, because you'd get the “look,” the logic being that no normal man spends his time in pathology. The fact that his job was in fashion now, and considered trendy and cool, made him believe that eventually everything must go in and out of public popularity and that a room full of monkeys would eventually write the Great American Novel. Your average Joe was so into forensics these days, Franklin was beginning to think there were great numbers of people with regular jobs who could perform an autopsy, with the right tools and a little professional supervision. Like learning to tune up your own car.

Franklin was not against knowledge. Knowledge was power. Knowledge would help him protect Emma and Blaine, would let him puzzle out what had actually happened to Emma's dead son, and would let him build an arsenal with which to annihilate the attentions of the Commonwealth Attorney's Office, Child Protective Services, and the accusing finger of Dr. Theodore Tundridge.

He took a bite of steak and egg. The omelet was about the size of a deflated football, and it tasted wonderful.

Tundridge had been very cooperative. Franklin had made it clear that he was not asking for Ned Marsden's medical records for any official investigation. Of course, Franklin had sort of buried this request by asking for the records of all children who had died of liver failure or complications in the last ten years. Tundridge, in the spirit of one researcher to another researcher not in direct competition for funds or fame, had been happy to comply, assuming that Franklin had been compiling some kind of mortality trends or records. Franklin had not said one way or another, but had agreed to credit Tundridge for his work should there be any publications involved.

This sort of cooperation was generous in an age when most researchers guarded their results and patented their work. Tundridge really did come across as a man who was genuinely concerned about liver function in children, and he had been rather excited by Franklin's interest, no doubt envisioning the gateway to lucrative government grants.

Still. A doctor who had provided bad medical care to a patient would not be so willing to fork over the information, even in the good-old-boy, dog-eat-dog world of medical research. Which meant that Tundridge did not think he had anything to hide.

It begged the question of his little basement laboratory, and the tissues and body parts he'd preserved in formalin with only the vaguest consent from his patients. Tundridge, if Franklin read him correctly, was dedicated to his work, and arrogant enough to think he had the right to do whatever he deemed reasonable to get results.

Dangerous thinking, and utterly common.

And he'd missed the cause of death.

Ned Marsden had died of aflatoxicosis—poisoning due to the ingestion of aflatoxins, presumably in contaminated food. Aflatoxins were the metabolites of the fungus
Aspergillus flavus
, resulting in mycotoxins produced by fungi. Toxic mold, in other words.

Aflatoxins were not uncommon—found in corn, beans, nuts. A problem for farmers, who had to take care that their livestock feed did not get contaminated and moldy and therefore become toxic to their animals. There were various tests one could perform with black lights, or by sending samples off to labs. Pretty simple really, and most farmers could test on their own. The problem was the sample. Stored corn, for instance—you get a sample from one spot, and it comes up clean, only to find that dead center is a literal hive of toxicity.

There were lesions on little Ned's tiny liver, and from his medical records and blood work, done over a period of six months, it looked like the child had been exposed several times. Emma had given him the food diaries she'd kept, but he had yet to go through them. He'd do that this afternoon. Thank God she'd kept them. Either advertently or inadvertently, the child had been exposed to toxins, which had gradually weakened his liver and overwhelmed his immune system—he was such a little guy, after all. The last exposure had swamped the boat and taken him under.

Franklin thought about how he would give this news to Emma, and to Blaine, because he knew, just from the time he had spent with his two girls, that although there was a great deal of tension between them, there was a great deal of love too. They were closer than they realized. And they had both loved Ned very much, and suffered over his illness and his death. Blaine already knew too much to be left out of the information flow. She would know something was up, and possibly imagine worse things from secret whispered conversations than she would from actually facing the facts.

He had a high opinion of Blaine. He had to remind himself sometimes that he'd never been a parent, because he had a great deal of confidence when dealing with her. There had been a definite rapport after that first dinner. Blaine was highly intelligent and deep in her heart very kind, but she masked it sometimes just like Franklin did. He knew it was crucial to let her keep that mask up, and always assumed the best regarding her behavior. And in truth, though Blaine was very hard on Emma, she was almost always very good to him. He loved taking her bowling, the way she concentrated and never got mad when she wasn't good at something. He loved her very offbeat sense of humor, and he loved the way she had let him right into the family, so that when the three of them were together, he never felt like an outsider. To a man who had been an outsider all of his life, it was a pretty amazing feeling.

Emma had asked him, several days ago, if he was looking to have children of his own someday. He had answered immediately and honestly without even stopping to think. He had told her that any man who had two females in his life like Emma and Blaine would hardly need anything more. It had taken her aback, his honesty, and the way he'd made it clear how he was feeling about the two of them, but she had recovered quickly, and laughed at him, and said, “What about Wally?” And he'd squeezed her hand and said, “Wally, too. But we might have to get a cat.”

He hadn't seen Blaine eavesdropping, so either she had been, because he knew she did sometimes, or Emma had told her what he'd said, because after that night she had started dropping hints about getting a kitten. He thought he might like to surprise her with one. Put it in a little basket with a bow and bring it home to her. He could just see the smile on her face. It gave him such a feeling, to know that he could put a smile on that little girl's face, he, Franklin, who had never been married and never been a father.

He wouldn't be putting a smile on her face tonight. But in the long run, it was for the best, and he'd make sure to use the knowledge to protect them. The thought of anyone else taking the smile off the face of either Emma or Blaine stirred a slow but enveloping anger, and an urge to protect that he had never known he had.

LENA

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

I had just lit a small cigarillo when I stood on Emma Marsden's porch and rang the bell. Nothing happened. I didn't hear it ring either, and decided it probably wasn't working, so I knocked. There was a turquoise Nova in the driveway, kind of junky and banged-up. It had a vanity license plate that read “LPN.” The promised Amaryllis Burton from the Tundridge Children's Clinic, I presumed.

The front door was opened with a kind of slow deliberation that left me tapping my foot, and it wasn't Emma Marsden at the door. The woman who stood behind the glass gave me a toothy smile that was sharklike. She looked past me into the driveway, and the smile went one-sided.

“So you're the lady detective.”

I can think of almost no greeting more likely to piss me off. If I blew smoke in her face, it could easily pass as an accident.

“I guess you better come in,” she said, as I walked past her and into the house. “You'll have to excuse me for answering the door, but Emma isn't feeling all that well.”

There was a smugness behind the words. An implication that she and Emma were very close and that like any intimate of the family, she had the run of the house, whereas I was merely a guest, and one who was as welcome as Christmas decorations the day after Halloween.

Emma herself was curled up on the couch, with a large golden retriever taking up three-quarters of the cushion space, head on her feet, kind of holding her down. She tried to shove the dog off her feet, which looked about as easy as moving a hippo with a nudge, and I shook my head.