Bad Blood (39 page)

“They take what the docs remove directly up to the blood bank for processing, aligning blood types, filtering out the bits of bone from the marrow, and things like that. Runs another hour.”

“And Duke?”

“He would have been resting in his room during that process. Once the marrow was ready to be transfused, the docs just brought it to him, hung it on an IV pole, and sent it on its way, to get to work inside his system.”

Anna made it sound so matter-of-fact.

“I thought you called it a transplant?”

“In the case of bone marrow,
transplant
and
transfusion
really mean the same thing. The stem cells are quite amazing. They have some kind of internal homing system. Once they’re transfused to the patient, they find their way — by themselves — right into the marrow. Like we docs say, the healthy stem cells set up ‘housekeeping’ exactly where they belong.”

“So from that day on, what happens to the patient?” Mike asked.

“Well, that would have been a rough period for Duke Quillian, or anyone else. Trish would have been on her way home in no time, but the next four weeks, Duke would have been under strict quarantine. He would have been isolated from other patients and even visitors — we can’t have the transplant patients exposed to infection. He was put on meds to suppress his immune system, to protect against graft-host disease, to do the best to see that he’d accept the new marrow.”

Mike was checking the records of the transfusion that Anna had passed to him against the timeline of Rebecca Hassett’s murder.

“What do the dates tell you?” I asked.

“This damn record shows Duke Quillian was still a patient here six weeks later, until a full week after Bex was killed,” Mike said, his disappointment evident as he slammed the file shut. “Would he have been quarantined till then?”

Anna reached for the thick folder. “You want to get me in trouble with my administration?” she said, trying to get him to lighten up. “We can go through his chart together. It looks like Duke was clear after Day Thirty, as we call it. Day Thirty’s the critical point. That’s when the DNA tests are done. He had a cautious doctor who was trying to keep him in a safe environment before sending him out in the world.”

“What DNA tests?” I asked.

“Routine blood exams to make certain that his sister’s bone marrow had not been rejected. That the DNA being produced in Duke was actually from the cells harvested from Trish.”

“Anna,” Mike said, leaning his elbows on her desk and beaming his most earnest look in her eyes, “was he in quarantine after Day Thirty?”

She took her time, reading through the pages of fine print, vital signs, and nurses’ notes. “No. No, he wasn’t. He was moved to a room on another floor. His doctor was still doing tests. Didn’t want him discharged for another two weeks. Something about Duke’s job and the high risk of infection it posed.”

Mike was practically in her face. “So just suppose this patient was stir-crazy. Suppose he was hungry for fresh air and a walk in the park. Was he strong enough, healthy enough to do that?”

“Of course. Sure he was. He’d just have to get past hospital security.”

“Outbound? Put on his street clothes and walk out the door. You think that’s ever a problem?”

“Mike, it’s nothing our security would want to hear about.”

“I’m talking more than ten years ago, Anna. I’m not getting anyone in trouble today. On the way back in,” Mike said, pushing back to talk to me, “Duke’s already got his hospital ID and a room number. What’s to stop him from waving at the guard and going back to his room? Damn, if he didn’t ring for his bedpan during the night, who would have missed him for a couple of hours?”

“Do you have an exact date, Mike?” Anna asked.

Mike told her when Rebecca Hassett was murdered.

She studied the file again, focusing on a specific page. She scratched her forehead before looking at Mike. “I can’t say the patient didn’t have a window to — to move around. Nurses took his vital signs at the beginning and end of each shift. No other medical procedures were noted.”

Mike seemed satisfied with the doctor’s answer.

I picked up the file to look at the dates for myself. “What were you saying about DNA tests? How do they figure in this? Trish and Duke — is their DNA the same now?”

“Let me explain it, Alex. Bone marrow is what produces blood. It’s the patient’s blood that is diseased in Mr. Quillian’s kind of diagnosis, and this treatment aims to replace that blood production source entirely, with a healthy one.”

“So Trish’s bone marrow was transfused to Duke?”

“Right. On Day Thirty, Duke’s blood was checked. That’s done by DNA probes.” Anna turned the file around. “The old method at that time. RFLP, four probes.”

Restriction fragment length polymorphism, the original technique used in DNA analysis, had been replaced within the last ten years by PCR, polymerase chain reaction.

“What did that test tell them?” I asked.

“Whether the transplant had been a success. Thirty days out from the procedure, the DNA results on Duke Quillian revealed that all of his blood was produced by his sister’s bone marrow. That was great news, for him and his physicians. If he’d been relapsing, there would have been a mix of the donor’s DNA — Trish’s — with the blood still being produced by the host.”

“And for how long do they check it?”

“Six months. One year later. Maybe two or three in all. Someone young and otherwise healthy, like this Duke Quillian character was — well, we’d consider him cured after that. What his medical team would be hoping is that he’d die of old age, with his sister’s DNA, his sister’s blood,” Anna said.

“Not quite the ending he met with,” Mike said.

“So it’s like identical twins,” I said. “From the day of the transfusion on, Trish and Duke Quillian had exactly the same DNA.”

“With one twist,” Anna Borowski said. “It’s only in the blood samples of each of them that their DNA is alike.”

“What do you mean?”

“Duke’s hair, his skin cells, his saliva — even his sperm — all those tissues retain their original properties. Test any of them and they’re still unique to Duke Quillian.”

I was thinking of the skin cells from his fingers that didn’t match any of the blood extracted from the tunnel debris. Now the discrepancy was beginning to make sense.

“But his blood?” I asked.

“He had a perfect recovery from the leukemia, thanks to the bone marrow transplant from his sister.”

“And that means from that moment in time on,” I said, “that both of them — Duke and Trish Quillian — had blood with an identical DNA profile.”

“Just tell the lieutenant we’re in the Bronx,” I said to the detective who answered in the squad room. “We’re picking up Trish Quillian. Mike wants to go at her again, so we’ll bring her down this afternoon, if she’ll come with us.” I hung up the phone.

“I bet she has no idea what the connection was between her brother’s blood and her own DNA,” Mike said.

“You’re right. She was sixteen when they did the transplant. Not many people understood what DNA was back then. I would have thought that once the disease was cured, the patient eventually started producing his own blood again. Especially since all the rest of his DNA was intact.”

“Forget the science lesson. She’s got to know something more about Duke than she told us. And maybe it’s time for her to find out about Bex — and the pregnancy. More bones in her backyard than she ever meant to dig up. I’ve never been so happy to be spit at in my life.”

The quiet street had a series of attached houses. Once tree-lined, now there were twisted stumps and vestiges of dead trunks. Deep potholes rutted the roadway, and the cement in the sidewalks was cracked in many places.

“That’s the house,” I said, pointing ahead on the left at a small stucco building with brown shutters in sore need of a paint job.

“And there’s the detail,” Mike said, pulling over and parking in front of a gray Honda in which two detectives were sitting, in the event Brendan Quillian paid a visit.

I started to open my door to get out.

“Hold it, Coop. Slide down, keep your head out of sight if you can.”

I knew better than to ask what Mike had seen as he pulled down the visor above his head and opened the newspaper that was next to him on the front seat to screen his face.

“All clear. He’s crossing the street and getting into his car.”

When I heard the door slam and the engine start, I lifted my head. Trish Quillian was standing in the doorway, turning to take the mail from the box affixed to the side of the house.

“Who’d I miss?” I asked.

“Teddy O’Malley. I wouldn’t think by the way he runs me around those tunnels all night he’d have the strength to make a condolence call.”

“You got that dark green SUV?” Mike said to the detective in the driver’s seat.

“Ford Explorer. I wrote down the plate soon as he headed up the stoop.”

“Follow him.”

“I got orders to sit on the house.”

Mike passed his card to the driver and smacked the hood of the car. “And I’m giving you orders to get off your ass and follow him. I’ll take over the sister. Tail him, wherever he goes, and call me every fifteen minutes. Chapman. Homicide.”

The two cops looked at each other and drove off after O’Malley’s SUV.

“They got as much chance seeing Brendan Quillian coming to call as they do of ever seeing Jimmy Hoffa’s body again,” Mike said, flipping open his phone and asking to speak to Lieutenant Peterson.

We walked up the steps of the house and I knocked on the door while Mike made his call.

“Loo? Better find out who’s got the team sitting on the Quillian crib. I just sent them off on a chase, so I guess you’ll need to replace them,” he said, pausing to listen to a question from his boss. “O’Malley. My pal Teddy O’Malley. Can’t imagine why he’d be dropping in on Trish — especially without letting me in on it — but I told the two flatfoots to tell me what he’s up to.”

Trish Quillian answered the door in the same black polyester track suit she had worn to the station house, with an apron around her waist.

“Is this a bad time?” I asked.

“There’s no good one for seeing you two,” she said, untying the apron and balling it up.

“I’m sorry. Were you helping your mother with something to eat?”

“What do you care? She’s asleep. Let her be.”

“May we come in?”

Trish held the door tightly in place for a moment. Then she stepped back, leading us into the small parlor of the still house. She sat on an ottoman and Mike steered me to the sofa opposite it. The room looked as if it had been frozen in time, like photographs I’d seen of the 1950s — cabbage roses had faded on the fabric of the furniture, worn antimacassars covered the arms of most of the mismatched chairs, photographs of family members and a large framed picture of Pope Pius XII hung on the striped wallpaper, which was rolling up at the seams.

“You didn’t finish asking me what you need? You gonna keep interrupting my business every single day?” she said, looking back and forth between us, seeming more fearful than she had before.

“Your mother get many visitors, Trish?”

“You got more sense than that, Detective. Nobody much knows she’s alive.”

“And you?”

“A regular social club. Don’t it look it?”

I took in the family snapshots that represented happier days. Trish Quillian in her Communion dress; Mrs. Quillian with her young brood at the beach in Queens, where Brendan’s accident had occurred; Brendan and Duke — I guessed — as teenagers, posing with their father at an assortment of construction sites — subway and tunnel entrances, work yards filled with heavy equipment that towered over the kids, familiar landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge, City Hall, and the Empire State Building.

“So, Teddy O’Malley, he just happened to be in the neighborhood?”

The veins in Trish Quillian’s neck stood out like blue lines in a road map as her jaw tensed and she glared at Mike.

“You watching me now? You peeking through windows and—”

“We drove up just as Teddy walked down the steps. We’ve met him, Trish. I recognized him, is all.”

“Then you know he’s the union rep. We had business, him and me. Business to clear up about Duke. Union benefits is all it is,” she said, looking down as she twisted the ties on the apron strings.

Mike leaned his elbows on his thighs. “You gonna be all right, Trish? Do you and your mother get taken care of?”

She closed her eyes and clamped her lips together, fighting back tears as she shook her head up and down.

From the hallway, up the stairs, I could hear the soft groaning noise that I assumed was coming from Trish’s mother. I knew we had to be here asking these questions, but the raw misery of this woman’s life was difficult to witness.

She wiped her eyes with the apron. “I got things to do. What is it you want now?”

“Like I said before, we’re still looking for Brendan.” Mike lowered his voice. “You’ve talked to him, Trish, haven’t you?”

“Why don’t you just move right in here, Detective? I’ll set an extra place at the table for you. Bring your own whiskey. No, I haven’t been talking to him.”

Mike stayed on her, gently but firmly. “He called you just hours after the shooting in the courthouse, Trish. Why would you lie for him after all these years?”

She stood up as the groaning sound became louder.

“I’ve got no need to lie for anyone. I got more important things to do.”

“Can you come with us down to the station house?” Mike asked.

“You’ve had your best shot at me already. Can’t leave my mother.” She pointed over her head.

“Make arrangements for tomorrow, then. You’ll need help, won’t you?”

“The help of God, Mike Chapman.” Trish walked toward the front door, mustering a laugh. “Wasn’t my spit any use for you?”

“It was, actually. Led us right back to Duke. Right to how you saved his life.”

The frightened young woman stopped in her tracks. “What about Duke?”

“We learned about the transplant,” I said. “We found his medical records from all those years ago. He must have been very grateful to you, Trish.”