Beyond Suspicion

“It’s the blood you drew from Ms. Falder.”

He blinked, confused. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

“That’s why I have the file,” he said with a wink. Johnson was known around the office as a strange-case specialist.

“What do you think it is?”

“I couldn’t even guess. Some kind of virus, maybe.”

“We need to send it off to the Center for Disease Control right away.”

“I already did, this morning. But there’s more to this case that troubles me.”

“Such as?”

“She came here with just over two liters of blood in her body.”

“I took only three vials.”

“That’s my point. Where are the other three and a half liters?”

“I don’t know. I looked at the photos. No blood at the scene of her death.”

“That’s right.”

“She couldn’t have donated it before she died. AIDS aside, nobody walks around with sixty percent of the blood in their body missing.”

“Right again,” said Johnson.

“Which means what? Somebody took it?”

He gave the doctor a serious look. “I think you and I are now on the same page.”

“She had multiple injection marks all over her body. I didn’t think anything of it. She had AIDS. She was getting injections almost every other day.”

“Looks like one of those holes was used to siphon out her blood.”

“That changes everything. If that much blood was drawn while she was alive, it would have sent her into cardiac arrest.”

“Which means the cause of death was anything but natural.”

“I need that body back,” said Chastan. “We need a full medical-legal autopsy. I can get on it this morning.”

“Go to it.”

He started for the door, then stopped. “Ed, why do you think someone might have wanted this woman’s blood?”

“Don’t know. But I have a feeling we’ll have a better idea when we hear back from disease control.”

“You think someone out there is into collecting blood infected with strange organisms?”

“Collecting. Or harvesting.”

With all that he’d seen over the years-dismembered bodies, charred babies-it took a lot to get a reaction from Dr. Chastan. But the thought of someone cultivating disease in human hosts was up there. “This could be one sick son of a bitch.”

“You got that right.” Johnson switched off the light on the microscope and put the blood plate back in the file. “I’ll put homicide on notice.”

“Sure,” he answered. “The sooner the better.”

28

•

Jack couldn’t get The Beatles’ “Tax Man” out of his head. It reminded him of Sam Drayton-an old, a

After the meeting, Jack stopped to collect his thoughts at an open-air café on Miami Avenue. Just down the street from the old federal courthouse, it had been one of his favorite coffee spots during his years as a prosecutor. The smell of arroz con pollo, today’s lunch special, wafted from the noisy kitchen in back. A guy with no shirt, no shoes, and practically no teeth was selling bags of limas from a stolen shopping cart at curbside. A largely Spanish-speaking crowd sipped espresso at the stand-up counter along the sidewalk. Jack found a stool inside and ordered a café con leche, a big mug of coffee that was half milk. The woman behind the bar remembered him from his days as a prosecutor. She smiled and worked her old magic, frothing up the milk with the steamer just the way Jack liked it.

“Muchas gracias,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she replied.

It was the same routine they’d followed for eight years, Jack’s wooden Spanish evoking a reply in English. The story of his barely Cuban life.

Jack’s meeting had gone even worse than he’d feared, but he tried to shake it off. He needed a contingency plan, but he had other things to deal with, too. Things more important. He needed to talk to Cindy.

He took his cell phone from his pocket, flipped it open, and froze.

What the hell?

He hadn’t noticed anything unusual at five A.M. when he’d called Cindy. It had been dark then, and he was too incoherent to have noticed. But now it was broad daylight. His head was no longer swirling. It was obvious to him.

The cell phone wasn’t his.

He sipped his café con leche and took a closer look. The phone looked exactly like his, a black Motorola issued by Sprint. He and Cindy used to have the exact same model, until they’d tired of getting them mixed up. He’d ended up buying Cindy a Nokia that looked completely different. It was just too easy to grab the wrong phone when you were racing out of the house in morning.

Someone, it seemed, had made the same mistake last night.

Jack flipped open the Motorola. He was familiar with all of the functions; they were the same as his own phone. He checked the message center. Nine voice mails were stored in the memory. He hit the play button. “Message one,” the recorded voice said. “Yesterday, eleven-thirty-two A.M.”

The message was in a man’s voice. The language was foreign. It sounded like a cross between Boris Yeltsin and Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson. Jack skipped to the next one. “Message two, yesterday, ten-twenty-one A.M.” A different voice but the same language.

The messages seemed bizarre now, just minutes after hearing that Viatical Solutions was controlled by some “criminal element” that was involved in money laundering. Until now, he’d had little recollection of his attacker’s voice, having been pounded so mercilessly. He couldn’t say the messages were in the same voice, but he was at least begi

Russian.

In his mind’s eye, he saw himself walking to his car from his grandmother’s townhouse last night. A punishing blow from behind sends his cell phone flying out of his hand. In the ensuing fracas, his attacker’s cell phone is yanked from her pocket or belt clip. A final blow to his head, and Jack is out cold, leaving the rest to conjecture-perhaps his attacker searching frantically in the darkness until she finds a phone that looks just like hers.

But it wasn’t hers. It was Jack’s.

Ho-lee shit. He smiled, then chuckled out loud. It was about damn time something had cut his way. We swapped phones!

“Señora,” he said to the hostess. In his best Spanish, he asked for bread and cream cheese. It was a heart attack in the making, but Abuela had sold him on the pleasures of slathering Cuban bread with cream cheese and dunking it into his café con leche.

She handed him two long strips on wax paper. “Enjoy.”

Jack was dunking at a near-frenzied pace, his mind awhirl. When they’d talked that morning, Cindy had told him that she’d called him on his cell but got no answer. It made sense that his attacker wouldn’t have answered before five A.M. But just as soon as someone dialed his number at a decent hour, she would answer, and then she’d realize that they’d swapped phones. If she were smart, she’d cancel her cell service and erase the messages.

He dropped his bread and cream cheese, hurried to the pay phone and dialed his office voice mail. He replayed each message onto the recording, then relaxed, suddenly feeling in control. She could cancel away, but Jack would forever have her messages.

Now what? he thought as he returned to his seat.

The fact that she hadn’t canceled her service and erased the messages told him that she wasn’t onto the swap just yet. He could call the cops, but they couldn’t trace the phone until she used it. Unless she tried to use it in the same battered and confused state that Jack had found himself in earlier that morning, she’d realize that the phone wasn’t hers, and she’d pitch it in the Dumpster, for sure. This might be his last chance to call and open up a dialogue. He grasped his attacker’s phone and dialed his own number. It rang twice before co