Most Wanted

Chapter Twenty-three

Christine sat with Lauren in the cramped white booth, waiting for Zachary. The room was stifling, but she had already thrown up, as well as having showered and changed into the pink shirtdress that she had worn to her first appointment with Dr. Davidow. She’d packed it because it was one of her nicer casual dresses, which meant it didn’t have any pen marks or stiff patches of glue from school. Somehow, it seemed fitting for today, when she would learn if Zachary Jeffcoat was Donor 3319.

“Do you know how you’re going to ask him? How you are going to bring it up?” Lauren asked, her brow knit. She was already sweating from the heat inside the booth, which made her worry lines glisten. She’d showered, but had to put on the same clothes as yesterday, because she hadn’t had time to pack herself, having packed three boys, their sports gear, two dogs, and the dog’s Prozac, for their weekend of travel baseball.

“I think I’m going to try to engage him, like I would any one of my students.”

“Really? How so?”

“You know my theory, I let them read anything they want to, just so they read. I try not to judge. I build up their self-esteem and create a safe and nurturing environment, so we can build a rapport and they can learn.” Christine had been thinking about that last night. “So I’m going to do the same thing with him. Get him talking about something he really loves, and he’ll feel good about himself. Then I’m going to look for a way to bring up the subject.”

“Sounds good.” Lauren smiled, in an encouraging way. “Do you want to rehearse it?”

“No, thanks.” Christine knew that rehearsing would bring her jitters to the fore, not only the nervousness she had about asking him but from the fact that this was the last time she would see him. It wasn’t that she wanted to see him again, but she didn’t like the idea that she would never see him again, and her emotions hung somewhere in the middle, in a netherworld between attraction and repulsion. She’d tossed and turned last night, trying to visualize how this final meeting would go. And she couldn’t help but think that he could be innocent, especially after she’d learned from Linda Kent that he wasn’t Gail Robinbrecht’s only hookup.

“You’re stressing, I can tell.” Lauren’s lower lip puckered. “Why don’t you just come clean? Tell him the truth. Tell him that the reporter thing was a lie to meet him and find out if he was your donor.”

“No, I don’t feel comfortable with that.”

“Why? It will be easier than trying to get him to say it. So what if he knows you lied? You’re never going to see him again.”

Christine didn’t like the sound, never going to see him again. “But the fact that we used a donor is still a secret. You and my parents are the only ones who know. My in-laws don’t even know. I hate the idea of the exposure.”

“Oh, right.”

“Marcus doesn’t even know that I told my parents. He wanted to wait to tell the rest of the family, maybe until after the baby’s born. You’re the only one who’s allowed to know.”

“I’m so special.” Lauren smiled.

“Exactly.” Christine knew Lauren was trying to lighten the mood. “It feels weird to me that he should know before my in-laws do. I want as few people to know as possible.”

“I get it,” Lauren said, nodding. “Strictly need-to-know, like the CIA. But don’t you get tired of the family secrets? We have them, too. My aunt knows things my mother doesn’t know, my mother knows things that my sister doesn’t know. It’s hard to keep it all straight.”

“Sometimes it’s necessary.” Christine spotted Zachary’s blond head bobbing behind the guard in the secured part of the hallway and she straightened up in the hard chair. “He’s here.”

“Remain calm. You can do it.”

“Fingers crossed.” Christine caught Zachary’s eye, and he smiled. He looked genuinely happy to see her, and she didn’t think it was her imagination.

“I see him,” Lauren said, and they both watched as the guard unlocked Zachary’s handcuffs and showed him into the secured side of the booth, where he sat down, with a new smile.

“Good morning, Christine. Hi, Lauren. You two look nice.”

“Thank you.” Christine placed her legal pad and golf pencil on the counter, as if reestablishing her journalistic bona fides. “I have great news for you. We found you a really good lawyer.”

“That’s great!” Zachary’s eyes widened, his relief plain, and he beamed. “How did you do that so fast?”

“We got busy. He’s from West Chester, and he’s a very experienced criminal lawyer. His name is Francis Griffith but he goes by Griff. He knows about your case and he really wants to take you on. He gave me a business card, but they wouldn’t let me bring it in. So I’m going to have to tell him to contact you, is that okay?”

“Sure, that’s great. You sound like you know him.”

“No, but we met with him and really liked him. We talked about your case-”

“You told him I was innocent, right?” Zachary interrupted, newly urgent. “I don’t want one of those lawyers who thinks it’s fine to represent somebody guilty. I’m not guilty.”

Christine thought again of what Linda Kent had said and took a quick detour. “Zachary, can I just ask you, how well did you really know Gail Robinbrecht?”

“Honestly, I told you, I didn’t know her at all.”

“The first day you met her was the night before she was murdered?” Christine knew she was treading into forbidden territory, after the warning by Griff, but she couldn’t help herself.

“Yes.”

“Did you exchange emails with her or texts before you met her?”

“No, I met her in the cafeteria, chatted her up, and she said she was free that night, so we made a date. I didn’t even have her phone number.”

“How did you know where she lived?” Christine could feel Lauren trying to catch her eye, warning her off the questions.

“She told me the address.”

“You don’t know if she had a boyfriend or was seeing anybody else?”

“I have no idea. I know she wasn’t married, that’s all. Why?”

“Just curious,” Christine answered, avoiding Lauren’s disapproving eye. “Now, anyway, to get back to the lawyer, I told him what you told us and he completely understood. I’ll have him visit, or contact you; he probably knows how to do that.”

“He probably does. I don’t. I know I can get email, but they didn’t give me my email address yet. They’re saving all the email. They screen it before it goes to me.”

“Oh, even the lawyer’s? He said that would be privileged.”

“I don’t know. They told me most of the email is from media people and women who write the Death Row inmates here, whatever.” Zachary rolled his eyes, like a goofy teenager.

“The other thing Griff said is that he needs a retainer of $5,000.”

“Oh no.” Zachary grimaced.

“I hope that’s not a problem. I told him that you would pay him.”

“But five grand? I didn’t think it would be that much. I don’t know how I’m going to get the money. I have, like, $2,300 saved. I’d have more than that, but I’m paying off my student loan debt. Could you find someone cheaper?”

“Not that I know of, it’s the weekend. He said it’s low and I believe him.”

“Will he take less?” Zachary’s eyebrows lifted, with hope. “He should be able to get money later, like those lawyers on TV. They say they only get paid if you get paid.”

“That’s not the same kind of case, that’s a civil case,” Christine answered, touched by his naïveté.

“Can you lend me the money? I would put in my $2,300, and maybe you could put in the rest?”

“I don’t know.” Christine fumbled, off-balance.

“I would pay you back. When you finish the book and sell it, then you could just take it out of whatever you’re going to give me. You were going to give something, weren’t you, like a consultant?”

“I have to think about it.”

Zachary turned to Lauren. “Could you put in some? I’ll pay you back out of the book sales, I swear to you. Right now, there’s nothing I can do, there’s no way I can make money to pay for my defense.”

“I don’t think so, Zachary.” Lauren shifted in the chair, and Christine felt guilty for having gotten her into this spot.

“Zachary, Lauren is only helping me as an assistant, she’s not even getting paid. If it’s going to come from anybody, it should come from me.”

“So can you?”

“As I said, I have to think about it. I’ll go home and think about it.”

“Then you’ll let me know?”

“Yes, I’ll let you know.” Christine had to move on. “Let’s table the money discussion for now because there’s one more important thing I have to tell you, and it came directly from Griff. He said that this should be our last meeting. He doesn’t want you to be discussing your case with anybody except him.”

“Why?” Zachary asked, his eyebrows sloping down unhappily.

“He said that all these conversations are admissible and so are my notes.” Christine gestured at her pad, for effect. She’d practiced this part of the conversation in her mind.

“We’re not supposed to meet anymore?” Zachary’s lips parted in disappointment.

“No, this is it.” Christine knew he was disappointed but couldn’t let it show.

“What about your book?”

“He said it will have to wait, and I understand that, I really want what’s best for you.” Christine wasn’t lying about that part.

“But I like talking to you. I like you.” Zachary turned to Lauren and back to Christine. “I like you, too. It’s nice to have somebody to talk to, somebody normal.”

“I like talking to you, too.” Christine kept her emotions in check. She had a purpose for being here, she was on a mission. “It was so interesting yesterday, to get to know you better, to hear your life story. But I couldn’t live with myself if your defense was compromised because I want to write about you. That wouldn’t be right. I couldn’t sleep at night.”

“I appreciate that,” Zachary said, blinking. “That’s unselfish of you.”

“Thanks.” Christine kept her expression impassive, though she felt a twinge of guilt. “He also said you shouldn’t meet with anybody else, no one from the press, none of the other reporters or book people.”

“Even the movie people?” Zachary frowned. “They were from Los Angeles. They said they’re coming back.”

“Not even them.”

“But one of them knows somebody who knows J. J. Abrams. They know really famous people.”

“I understand, but Griff would say no.”

“They would totally have the money for a lawyer. They wanted to option my story for a movie. They said they would get me an agent and everything.”

“Ask Griff when you see him.” Christine hesitated. “Anyway, Griff said I could meet with you this one last time, and I was allowed to talk to you only about your background, but not about the case. That’s all I was really interested in anyway, I really wanted this to be more about you.”

“That’s cool.” Zachary brightened.

“We better get started.” Christine picked up her golf pencil. “First, let me say that we were both very moved by your story about your sister. We don’t have to go over that again, because I don’t want you to have to relive that.”

“Okay. I appreciate that.”

“We were both amazed that, given the circumstances, you managed to get yourself to college, graduating with honors.”

“Don’t forget it was magna cum laude.”

Lauren interjected, “I graduated magna cum laude, but my father always said it was magna cum loudly.”

They all laughed, and Christine could see that Zachary eased back in his chair on the other side of the Plexiglas.

“Now, Zachary, you said you always wanted to go to medical school. Why?” Christine held her golf pencil poised over her pad, ready to take fake-notes.

“I want to help people, to help society. I thought it would be rewarding, to cure something.”

“So I guess we could say that you’re unselfish, too.”

“Right.” Zachary’s bright blue eyes met Christine’s with warmth, and again, she couldn’t deny the connection she felt with him, wanted or no.

“What was your favorite subject in school?”

“Hmm,” Zachary smiled, tilting his head in thought. “You know, I would have loved gross anatomy. My girlfriend took it first year, and I used to help her study. There’s a lot of memorization, and I used to quiz her. She even took me to lab with her once though she wasn’t supposed to.”

“Lab?” Christine didn’t understand the turn that the conversation was taking.

“Anatomy lab. I loved it, even though it’s the hardest because you spend so much time in lab, dissecting and learning the structures you dissect. My girlfriend showed me how they started on the cadaver’s back, then flipped the body over, then you can see the face. That makes the experience seem even more real.” Zachary paused, but his expression didn’t change, almost pleasant. “She told me they dissected the thorax, upper extremities, lower extremities, then the abdomen, then sawed off the leg-”

Lauren blurted out, “She sawed off a leg?”

Christine felt troubled by his lack of emotionality but didn’t let her judgment show since Zachary was lowering his guard.

“You have to, to dissect the pelvis, then the face, which had a bunch of tiny sets of dissections. Eyes, nasal cavity, ear canal, and a bunch of nerve structures run through the face, especially the facial nerve and all its branches.” Zachary paused, reflecting. “She told me it took forever. Then she sawed off the skull with a bone saw and removed the brain. She used the brains and brainstems in neuroanatomy in the spring semester.”

Christine felt her stomach turn over, and it wasn’t only the graphic nature of what he was saying. Zachary seemed to go into loving detail about the human anatomy. “I would think that would be difficult to hear about at dinner, much less see.”

“No, I could compartmentalize it. When she showed me the cadavers, they were all lined up in steel boxes and each had an index card with their occupation, cause of death, and age taped to their case. She didn’t even know how to put the scalpel blade on the shaft, I had to show her.”

“How did you know?”

“From work. I know all about scalpels. Brigham makes thirty-seven different types, at three different product lines and price points.” Zachary nodded. “For the first slice into the flesh, and depending on where the flesh is or how thick, you use a different scalpel. I won’t bore you with details, it’s shop talk. But once you pierce the skin, the scalpel should glide with ease until you hit a bony structure or muscle, with the exception of the face. You really have to peel that, and fat is yellow and greasy, almost like a really ripe mango.”

“Yuck,” Christine heard herself say before she could stop herself. She understood that a prospective medical student would revel in the details of human anatomy, but Zachary was sending shivers up her spine. Lauren must have felt the same way because she leaned away from him.

“Sorry you asked?” Zachary smiled, warming to his topic. “My girlfriend showed me her notes, and the professor said that the trick to anatomy is finding the right fascial plane, the layer of fascia where you could freely separate the muscles from one another or from a structure. My girlfriend said, finding a good plane could be the difference between a two-hour dissection and a four-hour dissection that she had to superglue together.”

“Superglue?” Christine asked, thinking she had misheard him.

“Yes, everyone in med school stashes superglue in their table.” Zachary chuckled in a knowing way. “It’s inevitable you’ll rip a nerve when you’re moving a muscle out of the way, or working too fast with your scalpel down a fascial plane. A little bit of superglue, and the nerve will innervate the muscle again.” Zachary leaned back, relaxing. “You know what I’d love most of all? Heart dissection. It’s probably the coolest of all. I’d have loved to be in cardiology research.”

“Why?” Christine asked, shocked. She was remembering the detail about Gail Robinbrecht’s murder and the other nurses, killed with a single stab wound to the left ventricle. She didn’t understand why Zachary would even go there, given that he must have read the same accounts, but she didn’t stop him. She wrote a note, cardiology, so he couldn’t see her expression.

“You cut the rib cage open to get into the thorax, then go through the pericardial sac, which the heart sits inside of.” Zachary made a cutting motion with his hand, demonstrating by holding an imaginary scalpel. “You cut one major vessel at a time-coronaries, aorta, pulmonary vein-and once you’ve cut all of the connecting structures, you deliver the heart from the pericardial sac.” Zachary paused, his smile spreading. “And then you’re holding a human heart in your hands.”

“How do you know this?” Christine asked, horrified. “Did your girlfriend tell you?”

“Yes, and then I got to observe heart surgery in the hospital. The surgeons let me, and my boss came, too. We had to see how the instruments performed in the OR. The most surprising thing? The heart is small. It seems so small to have such a huge role in your life, it’s smaller than your liver and your lungs by a lot.” Zachary’s blue eyes lit up. “You examine the outside and the four chambers, and how they circulate from the body to right atrium, then to the right ventricle, via the tricuspid valve.” Zachary made a loop de loop with his hands, in the air. “Then to the pulmonary artery and lungs, then back via the pulmonary vein to the left atrium and to the left ventricle, via the mitral or bicuspid valve. The left ventricle is the powerhouse. It pumps to the entire body’s systemic circuit, via the aorta.”

Christine couldn’t take it any longer. “You know, that’s the way Gail Robinbrecht was murdered, the way they all were murdered, stabbed in the left ventricle.”

“I’m aware, and the newspapers say the killer must have been a doctor or a med student, but if he was, he wasn’t a very good one.” Zachary’s tone turned superior. “It’s true that you can kill somebody by stabbing the left ventricle, but that takes a lot of force. The heart is tucked in under the lungs, and the left ventricle is the bottom right, here, called the ‘apex of the heart.’” Zachary pointed at his chest. “The killer would have to aim between the second and fifth intercostal space, between the ribs on the left side, then angle it up and in to reach the apex of the heart.”

Christine kept her expression impassive, but Zachary continued, oblivious.

“The intercostal spaces are only an inch or two between each rib, that’s why it would be hard to have perfect aim with the first stab, without getting stopped by a rib. That’s why your ribs are there, after all, to protect your thorax and mediastinum.” Zachary’s eyes lit up. “The human body is a beautiful thing, the way it’s designed, all of it intended to protect the heart, to keep the person alive. So obviously, you could kill somebody that way, but it doesn’t make sense.” Zachary shrugged. “That’s how you know I’m innocent. I know better than this serial killer. If I wanted to kill somebody with a stab wound, I would stab the carotid, or the second-best, the right kidney. It’s above the right hip, lower than the left kidney. If you stab somebody there, that would send them into shock, and they’d bleed out and die.”

Christine flip-flopped, changing her mind. Zachary might have known about anatomy, but maybe he truly was innocent. He seemed to be saying that someone who knew about anatomy wouldn’t have killed the nurses the way they’d been killed, meaning he was innocent.

“The other problem with stabbing someone in the left ventricle, or anywhere in the heart, is that the heart is so strong it will initially try to contract to hold the gap closed, but the more wide and gaping the stab wound to the heart wall, the more blood will leak out. It would pump out of the chest with each heart beat after the stabbing.”

Christine recoiled.

“Then the heart will start beating harder and faster to try to get blood to the aorta and to the body. Most of it would be leaking out of the wound, of course, but it’s a beautiful thing, the way the entire body is structured to protect the heart and the way the heart would try to save itself, save its body. Once you know the anatomy, you appreciate it even more, don’t you?” Zachary seemed to come out of his reverie. “I would have loved med school. I would’ve done anything, worked any job, to get the money for tuition.”

Christine hoped she could get him back to her point. “What did you do, to get the money?”

“Everything, anything. I had three jobs. I was a movie usher, I was a math tutor, and I waited tables. I sold a futon on eBay. I sold my car, too. I even sold my plasma.”

“You can sell plasma?” Christine sensed they were getting closer.

“Sure, I sold blood, too. I even sold-” Zachary stopped himself, and Christine held her breath.

“You sold what?” she asked lightly, though her heart was thundering.

“I’d tell you, but you can’t put this in the book. This is off the record.” Zachary glanced over his shoulder, then leaned closer to the hole in the Plexiglas. “I sold sperm, too. They call it donating, but I don’t know why. They pay you.”

Christine felt her heart stop. She had rehearsed this moment last night, how she would react if he told her, yes or no. She was this close to finding out the answer, she could feel it within her grasp. She was dying to know, and she was terrified to know. She told herself to get her act together. She made herself continue. “You were a sperm donor? I always wondered how that worked.”

“I assume you know how it works.” Zachary chuckled. “Hey, it’s random, but I did it. It paid really well. They put you in a program, you do it for a year. I didn’t tell anybody. I thought it would help people, but I really needed the money. I knew my parents would kill me if they found out. My parents thought if people aren’t meant to get pregnant, they don’t get pregnant. They would think that was playing God.”

Christine felt herself reeling, as he spoke. Everything he was saying corroborated his online profile. She had to keep him going. “Zachary, how much did they pay you?”

“I made a thousand dollars that year, and I liked the people at the bank.”

“Bank?” Christine said, as if she were unfamiliar with the term.

“Sperm bank. It was called Homestead.”

“Oh?” Christine squeezed her golf pencil, masking her reaction, which was almost violent, her emotions in tumult.

“It had an office near campus. I donated anonymously. That’s the only way I’d make the deal. I gave them two pictures of me, because they kind of pressure you to do that. But they don’t release your name when they put it online. They give you a number.”

“A number?”

“Yes, a donor number.”

“What was your number?”

“Why?” Zachary frowned, surprised.

“I’m just curious.”

“My number was 3319.”