Predator

55

Dr. Bronsonis in his office, moving a slide around on the stage of his compound microscope. Marino knocks on the open door.

Dr. Bronson is smart and competent, always neat in a starchy white lab coat. He’s been a decent chief. But he can’t dislodge himself from the past. The way things were done is how he still does them, and that would include how he evaluates other people. Marino doubts Dr. Bronson bothers with background checks or any other sort of intense scrutiny that should be standard practice in today’s world.

He knocks again, this time louder, and Dr. Bronson looks up from the microscope.

“Do come in,” he says, smiling. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

He is a man of the old world, polite and charming, with a perfectly bald head and vague, gray eyes. A briarwood pipe is cold in the ashtray on his neatly arranged desk, and the faint aroma of aromatic tobacco always lingers.

“Least down here in the sunny south they still let you smoke indoors,” Marino says, pulling a chair close.

“Well, I shouldn’t,” Dr. Bronson says. “My wife keeps telling me I’m going to get cancer of the throat or tongue. I tell her if I do, at least I won’t complain much on my way out.”

Marino remembers he didn’t shut the door. He gets up, shuts it and sits back down.

“If they cut my tongue or vocal cords out, then I guess I won’t be griping much,” Dr. Bronson says as if Marino didn’t get the joke.

“I need a couple of things,” Marino says. “First, we’d like to run a sample of Johnny Swift’s DNA. Dr. Scarpetta says there should be several DNA cards in his case file.”

“She ought to take my place, you know. I wouldn’t mind if she was the one who took my place,” he says, and the way he says it makes Marino realize that Dr. Bronson probably knows all too well what people think.

Everyone wants him to retire. They wanted him to retire years ago.

“I built this place, you know,” he goes on. “Can’t just let any Tom, Dick or Harry come in and muck up everything. Not fair to the public. Certainly not fair to my staff.” He picks up the phone and presses a button. “Polly? How about pulling the Johnny Swift case for me and bringing it in. We’ll need all the appropriate paperwork.” He listens, then, “Because we need to receipt a DNA card to Pete. They’re going to do something with it over at the labs.”

He hangs up, takes off his glasses and cleans them with a handkerchief.

“So, am I to assume there’s some new development?” he asks.

“It’s beginning to look that way,” Marino replies. “When it’s a certainty, you’ll be the first to know. But put it like this, some things have come up that make it pretty damn likely Johnny Swift was murdered.”

“Happy to change the manner if you can show that. Never was all that comfortable about the case. But I have to go with the evidence and there just hasn’t been anything significant in the investigation to make me sure about anything. Mostly, I’ve suspected suicide.”

“Except for the shotgun missing from the scene,” Marino can’t help but remind him.

“You know, a lot of strange things happen, Pete. Can’t tell you how many times I show up and find the family’s completely mucked up the scene to protect the dignity of their loved one. Especially in autoerotic asphyxiations. I get there and there’s not a pornographic magazine or bondage accouterment in sight. Same with suicides. Families don’t want anyone to know or want to collect the insurance money, so they hide the gun or knife. They do all kinds of things.”

“We need to talk about Joe Amos,” Marino says.

“A disappointment,” he says, his normally pleasant expression fading. “Truth is, I’m sorry I recommended him for your fine institution. I’m especially sorry because Kay deserves a heck of a lot better than the likes of that arrogant little bastard.”

“That’s what I’m getting at. Based on what? You recommended him because of what?”

“His impressive education and references. He has quite a pedigree.”

“Where’s his file? You still have it? The original?”

“I sure do. I kept the original. A copy went to Kay.”

“When you went over this fancy education and references, did you check them out to make sure they were authentic?” Marino hates to ask him. “People can fake a lot of things these days. Especially because of computer graphics, the Internet, you name it. That’s one reason identity theft’s becoming such a problem.”

Dr. Bronson rolls his chair to a filing cabinet and opens a drawer. He walks his fingers through neatly labeled files and pulls out one with Joe Amos’s name on it. He hands it to Marino.

“Help yourself,” he says.

“Mind if I sit here for a minute?”

“I don’t know what’s taking Polly so long,” Dr. Bronson says, rolling his chair back to the microscope. “You take all the time you want, Pete. I’ll just get back to my slides. A sad one. Poor woman found in the swimming pool.” He adjusts the focus, his head bent over the eyepiece. “Her ten-year-old little girl found her. Question’s whether she drowned or had some other fatal event like a myocardial infarct. She was bulimic.”

Marino looks through letters that medical-school department heads and other pathologists wrote on Joe Amos’s behalf. He skims through a resume that is five pages long.

“Dr. Bronson? Did you ever call any of these people?” Marino asks.

“About what.” He doesn’t look up. “No old scarring of her heart. Course, if she had an infarct and survived for hours, I’m not going to see anything. I asked if she might have purged earlier. That can really muck up your electrolytes.”

“About Joe,” Marino says. “To make sure these big-shot doctors really know him.”

“Of course they know him. They wrote me all those letters.”

Marino holds a letter up to the light. He notices a watermark that looks like a crown with a sword through it. He holds up each of the other letters. They all have the same watermark. The letterheads are convincing, but since they aren’t engraved or embossed, they could have been scanned or reproduced with some sort of graphic software package. He picks a letter supposedly generated by the chief of pathology at Johns Hopkins and tries the number. A receptionist answers.

“He’s out of town,” she tells him.

“I’m calling about Dr. Joe Amos,” Marino says.

“Who?”

He explains. He asks her if she could check her files.

“He wrote a letter on Joe Amos’s behalf a little over a year ago, on December seventh,” Marino tells her. “Says here on the bottom of the letter the person who typed it has the initial LFC.”

“There’s nobody here with those initials. And I would have been the one who typed anything like that, and those certainly aren’t my initials. What is this about?”

“Just a simple case of fraud,” Marino says.