Open season

13

A long-standing maxim holds that overly tired people don’t sleep as well as they do normally. I didn’t have that problem. I slept for twelve hours straight and woke up in the same position I started out in-on my stomach, fully clothed. I won’t claim I felt refreshed, but at least I could function.

I washed, changed my clothes, and packed a bag. Assuming Beverly Hillstrom was as efficient as I thought she was, the Kimberly Harris samples had probably arrived in Brattleboro sometime during the night.

When I got to the office around 10:30, Murphy, as was now becoming his habit, found me in ted au hehe hallway. “I took you home to go to bed, not take a vacation. What have you been doing?”

“Sleeping.” I reached through Maxine’s small sliding-glass window and pulled out a daily report. The night had been blessedly boring. “What’s the rush?”

“Brandt thought it might be nice if you got on your way in the predawn darkness, especially since you’ll be carrying a cooler marked Caution-Human Remains.”

“So they came?”

“Yeah; about three hours ago. It’s in the fridge. I put it in a brown paper bag.”

“They pack that stuff in dry ice, Frank. You could have just shoved it under my desk.”

Murphy scowled. “It doesn’t matter.”

I shook my head, opened my office door, and turned on the light. Murphy turned it off. “You don’t have time. You’re leaving.”

I closed the door with a sigh and retraced my steps to the hall. Murphy left me to get the cooler. He returned carrying a grocery bag. “See? It doesn’t look weird.”

I shook my head and relieved him of it. “I’ll take your word for it.”

He escorted me out the door and to my car, looking around as if Katz would swing by on some vine, camera in hand. The mother-hen routine was a far cry from yesterday. Not that I was complaining, but I was still a little wary. I could only imagine last night’s conversation must have been a huge weight off his shoulders.

He put his hand on the car door as I was about to open it. “You think someone ought to go with you?”

“I don’t see why. I might be gone several days.”

“You and what’s-his-name, you mean.”

The thought had occurred to me. I looked at him closely. “Is this a complicated way of inviting yourself along?”

He beamed. “Yeah.”

“What about Brandt?”

He walked over to his car and got a small overnight bag out of the passenger seat. “I already cleared it with him… and Martha.”

The drive to West Haven takes about three hours, a straight drop south on the interstate. The weather was beautiful, cold and blue skied, and we shared a good mood. I was happy to have him along, and happy to see him out from under his self-imposed cloud. Comments about the end of the road and living on borrowed time go with the territory of old age, and Frank didn’t hold a candle to my mother, who in her mid-eighties was complaining that God had just forgotten her.

But it was a sliding scale, and Frank had temporarily slid himself too far down. I felt he was back now; still fearful of bad news but committed to finding the answer.

The University of West Haven is an unpretentious collection of ugly concrete buildings scattered across the top of a hill with no view. We got directions to the Business Administration Center, where Cetio the guard insisted we would find Dr. Kees, and parked in front of a gray and largely windowless five-story cube that was still very much under construction.

We got out and stared at it. There were other cars in the lot but not many. In fact, the entire campus had a forlorn, empty look to it.

“What do you think?” Murphy asked.

“Well, Hillstrom’s office is over a dentist. Maybe this guy likes abandoned buildings.”

He gestured to the back seat. “Should we take the stuff?”

“Might as well. I don’t want to lose it now.”

The red-and-white cooler, free of its brown bag, did indeed have Caution-Human Remains taped on one side. On the other was a happy penguin and the words Chilly Willy.

We picked our way over the construction-site debris that lay scattered across the frozen mud and entered a doorless front lobby. The buttons for the elevator hadn’t been installed yet. Nor, for all we knew, had the elevator. We began to climb the stairs, the clatter of our footsteps echoing off the bare concrete walls.

On the fifth floor, we found a door and behind it a wall of warm air. We walked down the unfinished, uncarpeted hallway, looking through doorways as we went, vaguely following the sound of a radio. We found it, and the young woman in cowboy boots listening to it, about halfway down. She was standing at an equipment-jammed counter, dropping blood from a pipette into a row of tiny saucers in perfect rhythm with the music.

She finished and smiled brightly at us. “Hi. Can I help you?”

Murphy and I looked at each other. “Does Dr. Robert Kees work here?”

“Sure does.”

She clomped out of the room and down the hall, leaving us surrounded by a truly impressive hodgepodge of gleaming, metallic, totally mysterious machines. The radio sounded tinny and cowed by its competition.

She returned in a couple of minutes, followed by an athletic middle-aged man with thick, swept-back black hair. He smiled broadly and stuck out his hand. “Hi. I’m Bob Kees.”

We introduced ourselves and he looked at the cooler. “Is that your friend?”

“Both of them. Maybe all three of them. Actually, that’s why we’re here; we don’t know how many are involved.”

“Beverly tells me you want all your information in twenty minutes or so, is that right?”

Murphy’s face brightened. “Is that all it takes?”

Kees laughed. “Not a chance. Assuming I was sitting around here dying for something to do, it might take me sixty to seventy-two hours, if I was lucky. The way things are, I could get to you in three weeks to a month.”

“A month?” Murphy burst out.

“How much did Dr. Hillstrom tell you about this?”

“She said it had something to do with reopening a case-that you might have put the wrong guy in the slammer.”

“This is going to sound a little corny, but we think an innocent man died because of what’s in this cooler.”

Kees pursed his lips and motioned us into the hallway. “Jeannie, let me know what you get from these as soon as you’re finished, okay? And hold off on the Spiegelmann stuff until I tell you.”

“Okay.”

He led us down the corridor and through a maze of overstuffed offices bulging with furniture and strange machinery. “In case you didn’t notice, we haven’t quite moved in. The university, in its wisdom, contracted for the destruction of our old quarters before the new ones were built. Then the workers went on strike.”

“What about the students?”

“You mean the lack of them? They went out on strike too-in sympathy with the workers and just in time to extend their Christmas leave. Protest isn’t what it used to be.”

We ended up in a pretty nice office, complete with rug on the floor and pictures on the walls. Half of it was piled high with junk too, but the other half looked neater and more pleasant than anything we had back home. Kees sat behind an old and unpretentious turn-of-the-century desk and locked his fingers behind his head. To his right, on a separate table, two glowing computers hummed softly to themselves.

“So, tell me your tale.”

The stereotype of the self-proclaimed “busy” man is a guy who spends half his time telling you he’s got none to spare. With one assistant and the rest out on strike, combined with what Beverly Hillstrom had told me about his popularity, Robert Kees struck me as having his life under control. He let us bumble through our story without one glance at his watch or a single sigh of impatience. When we finished, he got up, plucked the cooler from my lap, said, “Okay,” and left the room.

Frank raised his eyebrows. “What did that mean?”

“I guess he’s either doing it right now, or he just threw it out the window.”

“Were we supposed to follow him?”

“Not unless you know how to work any of that stuff.” We sat there for over an hour, staring out the window, staring at the floor, staring at each other, until he finally returned. “That’s quite the collection.”

“How do you mean?” He parked himself with his hands behind his head again. “It’s filled with goodies. A standard batch of samples, even from Beverly, has a few slides, a few swabs, maybe some tissue, and that’s about it. She threw in everything but the kitchen sink-she must have had some serious reservations when she did the autopsy.”

“That’s what she told me.”

“Then why the hell didn’t she tell us at the time?” Murphy muttered. “It sure would have saved us a lot of wear and tear, not to mention an extra body in the morgue.”

Kees smiled. “Ah, buted. we that’s not the game, is it? You demand, we supply. Nobody wants to ask us about our doubts-that’s for the defense. If we find something odd, the prosecution doesn’t want to know about it, not unless we can guarantee where it’ll lead them. Besides, according to the paperwork she enclosed, you’ve got the right man in jail.”

Frank passed his hand across his mouth. “Then what are we doing here?”

“I can dig deeper than she can. I think that’s why she kept as much as she did-just in case. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but you’ve got yourself a very good medical examiner up there.”

“So what happens now?” I asked.

“You wait. I work. Most of the stuff is in an incubator right now. It’ll stay there overnight. There are a couple of things I can do in the meantime but not much, except make a few phone calls and rearrange everyone else’s schedule.”

“We do appreciate this-a lot.”

“It’s okay. Why don’t you come back in about three days? We’ll see what we’ve got.”

I got up, but Frank didn’t move. “You wouldn’t have a corner we could bunk in, would you?”

Kees’s eyes widened. “You mean stay here?”

“Yup.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because we don’t know for sure what’s going on. We think Ski Mask is just pushing to reopen the case. We think he’s bumped off some guy just to get our interest. We think he and us are the only people involved in this thing, and I’d lay bets he followed us here. But we don’t know any of that for sure. There’s an equally strong possibility that there’s a separate bunch just as hell-bent on keeping a lid on this, to the point that they almost killed my partner here, and that they too are hot on our tail. That cooler is the only thing so far that isn’t pure invention, and I’m not about to leave it behind in a half-demolished building and spend two days going to the movies. Is that all right with you guys?”

Kees shrugged. “We’ve got the room and the furniture… God knows we’re not too crowded. Be my guests. Just don’t get underfoot, okay?”

Murphy stood up and nodded. “You got it.”

I followed him out the door, closing it behind me. “You really going to do this?”

“You bet your butt. You get a star witness that can bust a case wide open, what do you do with him? You sit on him until they need him. That cooler’s our witness.”

“It may not be, Frank.”

He turned and poked me in the chest with his finger. “Maybe not. That was my tune until last night. Now I’m singing yours. So humor me.”

I held up both palms in surrender. “Consider yourself humored.”

We found a room with a few pieces of machinery, all of it unplugged, and a pile of tables, desks, filing cabinets, and armchairs. Several pirsender. “illows on the floor made for serviceable if lumpy beds. Murphy borrowed my car keys, disappeared for a couple of hours, and returned with some magazines, a couple of pulp novels, enough junk food to hold us for a week, and a rented TV.

The next two-and-a-half days passed slowly. Frank and I watched, as the hours crawled by, morning news shows, midmorning talk shows, midday news shows, hours of soap opera, more hours of pre-dinner sitcom reruns, evening news shows, prime-time whiz-bangers, late night action shows, more now-stale news, and finally the twilight zone of Leno, Letterman, old movies and more reruns.

We stood around, we sat, we lay on our pillows, we read a little, we washed at the basin in the half-finished bathroom. We waited.

Every once in a while, we caught a glimpse of Kees or his cowgirl in the hallway. They politely bade us good night on their way out every evening and gave us a cheery good morning hours later, but we kept out of their hair and they didn’t seek us out. On the morning of the third day, the sound of heavy equipment starting up outside told us the strike had been settled.

But it wasn’t until the fourth day that Kees appeared in our doorway and asked us to follow him to his office.

After that amount of time, and the bored tension that went with it, my druthers were to come face-to-face with tangible results-like a reconstructed body or at least a steamer trunk filled with evidence. But aside from a few sheets of paper lying in the middle of his desk, Kees’s office looked unchanged from before.

We sat down like two rumpled old men awaiting counseling and watched Kees assume his by now traditional pose. “What do you know about blood typing?”

Murphy opened his mouth, but I beat him to it. “Hillstrom told me something about Hs and secretors and PG-something-or-other sub-typing that gets the blood more and more specific to a single person.”

“Okay. That gives me an idea of how to approach this. Let’s back up, though, and look at what we’ve got. From what you told me and from Beverly’s samples, I figure we’ve got two categories: the physical evidence-things like the underwear, the rope, the broken lamp, the general signs of a struggle, stuff like that. And the tissue samples, taken from a variety of sources-the fetus, the semen, the stains on the sheet, etc.

“Now on the first, you guys are the experts. Your living is going around matching evidence with unwitnessed action. What I do isn’t that different. What I’m going to tell you is part scientific fact, and part educated conjecture. When you leave here, in other words, you’ll have more than you had, but you’re still going to have to put the pieces together on your own. Okay?”

We both nodded.

“All right. Now you nailed the suspect… What’s his name?”

“Davis.”

“You nailed Davis as a group O secretor-the same as both semen samples. We tested both as separate entities because as far as we know, they might have been placed by different men.”

Murphy shook his head. “Lovely thought.”

“But unfortunately realistic, although not necessarily in the way you think. She may have been attacked simultaneously by two men, but she might also have had intercourse with one man, come home, and been attacked by a second. Here’s an instance where conjecture takes over, in fact. I seriously doubt that a woman would receive semen in either one of these two areas, and then put her clothes back on and walk home. It is only reasonable to assume it all happened at once. Had one of the deposits been inside her vagina, I wouldn’t necessarily take that position.

“In any case, the whole thing is a little ephemeral because the mouth sample pretty much stops there-at O secretor. It’s far too contaminated by the victim’s saliva to be analyzed any further. That, luckily, is not the case with the pubic sample.

“The typing and subtyping Beverly told you about is called Phospho-Gluco-Mutations typing, or PGM for short. Basically, it’s an enzyme that is polymorphic, meaning different people have different types. At this point, we’ve determined ten subtypes in the population. With time, we’ll probably get more, but in your case, this was enough.”

“So you did get something,” Murphy asked.

“Oh yes. Here, look at this.” Kees took the top sheet of paper off his little pile and slid it across the desk. In neat, penciled handwriting, there was a single column of figures:

Suspect

Group O secretor

PGM type 2–1 subtype 2 + 1 +

ESD 1

GLO 2-1

ACP BA

“That’s Mr. Davis. Here’s the semen.” He slid the second sheet over:

Semen

Group O secretor

PGM type 1 subtype 1 + 1 +

ESD 1

GLO 1

ACP BA

I couldn’t resist a smile. “So they don’t match.”

“Nope.”

“How about the fetus?”

“Okay, now on the fetus… Well, to back up a little, you know that a fetus is a product of its parents.”

Murphy sighed.

“Meaning that if you have one parent and the fetus, you can get a vague notion of the missing parent’s makeup. You can also therefore exclude people who do not fit that vague makeup. Which leads me to this.” And he slid the third sheet toward us:

Mother

Group A

PGM 2

subtype 2 + 2 +

ESD 1

GLO 1

ACP B

Fetus

Group B

PGM 2 — 1

subtype 2 + 1 -

ESD 1

GLO 2 — 1

ACP B

Father

Group B or AB

PGM 1–1, 1 + 1 — , 2 + 1 — , or 2–1 -

– -

ESD 1 or 2 — 1

GLO 2 or 2 — 1

ACP B, BA or CB

We both stared at it; Kees saved us from asking any idiotic questions. “To summarize that in English, Davis is neither the semen depositor men alnor the father of the fetus. But neither is the real semen depositor the father, so now you’ve got three men.”

“Davis, the man who attacked her, and the father.”

Kees made a steeple of his fingers. “No. Davis, the depositor, and the father. If Beverly’s guess is right-that the semen was brought to the site and deposited artificially-then Davis could have been the one who attacked her. After all, you still have all that physical evidence against him.”

“Oh, come on,” Murphy said. “I don’t buy that crap about the semen being poured all over her like salad dressing. People don’t do that.”

“Perhaps not, but other possibilities exist. There might have been two attackers-Davis and the depositor-and you only got Davis.”

Murphy rubbed his forehead.

“Or even, to humor Beverly once again, the father and Davis might have been in cahoots and the semen secured from some innocent third party and, once again, artificially placed.”

“Come on.”

Kees laughed, enjoying his devil’s advocacy. “If push came to shove and I were placed on the witness stand and a very sharp lawyer asked me, ‘Dr. Kees, since all you could get from the sample in the mouth was Group O secretor, doesn’t that mean it could have been Davis’s semen, even though the other sample was not?’ I would have to answer yes. I would also have to concede that in cases of gang assault such evidence is not rare.”

“Meaning that Davis might have deposited one of the semen samples?”

“It’s possible. I told you I couldn’t give you answers-just information. Now I have to admit I tend to agree with Captain Murphy. People usually do the simplest thing in these situations. They are rarely operating at their highest mental capacity. Chances are Davis was framed by a man who sexually assaulted the young woman and then killed her, or the other way around. But I’m afraid what I’ve given you doesn’t prove that-it merely suggests it.”

There was a long silence in the room. I have to admit, the joy I’d felt at hearing the semen wasn’t Davis’s had vanished. I’d seen enough lawyers at work to know that the information we’d just received didn’t even warrant a reopening of the case, much less a retrial. My only consolation was that Frank looked as down as I was. Several days ago, he would have been grinning from ear to ear.

Kees, on the other hand, was still smiling. “I feel I ought to add at this point that that,” and he pointed at the three sheets of paper, “is not the only thing I found.”

We both looked at him, Murphy obviously peeved.

“One of the reasons all this took a little longer than I planned was that I ran the semen by a couple of extra tests. One of them came up with the fact that the depositor was taking a drug called prednisone at the time he ejaculated.

“It’s a common prescription drug, a glucocorticoid, to be exact. Pharmacists sell it for its anti-inflammatory properties to treat everything from asthma to arthritis to poison ivy. Now thon a ere is a large family of glucocorticoid drugs. Prednisone is cheaper than most of the others, but it is more potent and far likelier to cause side effects. As such, I would doubt it was administered for something minor like poison ivy; I’d guess it was more like arthritis or asthma.”

“It sounds like you’re saying the depositor was an old man in a wheelchair.”

“For the arthritis, you may be right. That is mostly found among the elderly. But asthma is something else. A lot of young and otherwise healthy people suffer from it.”

He got up from his chair and stood by the window, looking out.

“I’m also inclined to think it was either one or the other of those because they’re long-term ailments, and indications are that the depositor had been taking this medicine for four weeks or more.”

“What indications?”

He hesitated a moment. “Understand that all this gets into the speculative. I mean, I have certain scientific indices to go by, but my conclusions are really my own.”

“All right.”

“During the testing, I found both a slightly lower sperm count and a lower amount of the body’s naturally produced hydrocortisone. Now the first is no real indication of anything-tight pants can knock off sperm-but the second, taken with the first and coupled to the presence of prednisone, is a red flag for Cushing’s syndrome.”

Neither Frank nor I moved or said a word. Both of us felt that in his understated way, Robert Kees was about to make us a gift.

“I almost hate to tell you this, because it’s so thin, but I do feel I’ve let you down a little with the other stuff. But take it all with a giant grain of salt.” He cleared his throat. “If you take prednisone for a month or more, chances are you’ll start to bloat-retaining fluids you normally pass to the outside. Usually, that’s where it stops, but every once in a while-and I’m talking rarely here-you develop Cushing’s. You become weak and overweight, with a rounded, pinkish moon face; you bruise easily, suffer from occasional delirium and depression, and any psychological disorders can become exaggerated. But the most telling thing about Cushing’s, at least physically, is the emergence of a kind of buffalo hump high on the back.”

“You mean the guy’s a hunchback?” Murphy asked.

I put my hand on his forearm to quiet him.

“Now, assuming that all this fell into place, which is highly unlikely though possible, there is no way to determine how long the depositor was on the medicine, why he took it in the first place, or whether he’s still on it. Furthermore, just as the syndrome appears after a month or more, it disappears a month or less after treatment is terminated.”

Kees sat back down. “What I’m giving you here is my educated guess. Because of the low hydrocortisone level in the sample, I’d say there’s an outside chance your man did develop Cushing’s-that would make him stand out in a crowd. Furthermore, for the hundreds of people who might be issued one of the prednisone family of drugs from any given urban pharmacy, only two to fionle’s an ove will have prescriptions running for over a week to ten days.”

I glanced over to Murphy’s face. He looked back, smiled, and nodded. “Now that’s a lead.”