Blood Lies (7 page)

“How so?”

“She’s called a truce with Ella, her archenemy from preschool.”

“I didn’t know you can have an archenemy in preschool.”

“Me neither.” Alex laughed. “But those two were oil and water. Until a couple of weeks ago when they discovered a mutual love of those tiny Polly Pocket dolls. Now they’re the bestest of friends.”

“Ah, if only Disney and Mattel ran the world…”

“I think they already do,” she groaned.

I had a sip of my coffee. “And Marcus? What’s he up to?”

At the mention of her husband, the joy drained from her face. “He’ll be tied up in New York for a while longer,” she said with an evasive shrug.

“That blood bank business of his is really taking off.”

“I guess,” she said distantly. “Seems like all new parents want to store their children’s umbilical cord blood.”

I knew that umbilical cord blood contains stem cells that, if stored at birth, can be used later to repopulate the bone marrow with healthy cells in the event a bone marrow transplant is ever required. It represented another form of insurance for parents, and I understood the demand for it. If I ever had a child, I would probably want the same.

“So let’s hear about your trauma patient,” Alex said, clearly trying to divert the conversation away from the topic of her husband.

I told Alex about Enrique Martinez’s stabbing. She said all the right things—the same things I would have said, but not necessarily believed, if our roles had been reversed. Still, I felt better for having vented to her.

She reached out and squeezed my hand supportively. “So, how are you?”

I looked away and bought some time with a long sip of coffee. “Okay, thanks. Better, really.”

“Hmmm.” She let go of my hand. “The cops still don’t have any leads?”

“I pulled myself or I was pulled—I’m not sure which, actually—from the case. I haven’t heard in a couple of days.”

Alex studied me intently. “And that’s killing you, isn’t it?”

I smiled. “You have me pegged for a control freak, huh?”

“No,” Alex said, stone-faced. “I know how much Emily meant to you. If I were in your shoes, I would be desperate to know who did that to her.”

“You’re not far off,” I said. “I’m half tempted to start my own investigation.”

A smile broke through Alex’s tight lips. “What with all your training and expertise.”

“Alex, I can’t shake this sense that somehow Emily’s death and Aaron’s—” I stopped the moment I saw Rick step through the door.

Alex turned to look over her shoulder, and we silently watched as Rick and Helen approached.

I introduced Alex to the detectives. She glanced at her watch. “Oh, darn. My shift started five minutes ago.” She reached over and tapped my hand. “Ben, call me later, okay?” She snatched up her coffee and hurried for the door.

Helen stood and fingered her chunky necklace that had so many big colorful stones it looked as if it would strain her neck just to hold it up. “A nurse in the ER told us we’d find you here. May we join you?”

“Sure.”

Helen eased herself into the booth. Rick dropped into the spot beside her.

“You already heard about Enrique Martinez?” I said.

Helen grimaced. “Enrique
who
?”

“The neck-stabbing victim. Killed the same way J.D. was.” I glanced from one blank face to the other. Suddenly, I felt on edge. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

Looking particularly subdued, Helen simply shook her head. Even more unsettling, Rick hadn’t yet smiled.

“What is it, then?” I asked.

“We wanted to follow up on a few loose ends,” Rick said.

My sense of alarm rose another notch. “Like what?”

As if overpowering his restraint, Rick’s lips curled into a slight smile. “For starters, Ben, do you happen to know your blood type?”

“I’m a suspect?” I struggled to keep my tone under control.

“We’re dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s, Ben,” Helen said sheepishly, but her reassurance brought me no comfort.

This can’t be happening
.

Rick scratched his chin, unperturbed. “Do you have any idea what percentage of murders are committed by the significant other or the ex?”

“Five years after the fact?” I said.

“Any time.”

“This is crazy,” I muttered.

Rick shrugged. “About your blood type—”

“You know my blood type,” I snapped. “It’s the same as Aaron’s.”

“AB-negative.”

“Yes.”

Helen looked up at me, her big gray eyes devoid of their usual humor but not their kindness. Clearly, she was finding this interrogation as awkward I was. “Ben, at the crime scene you told us that you didn’t know J.D.,” she said.

I held up my hands. “I didn’t. Not even his name.”

“But you had met him?”

“Once.”

“The day you threatened him, right?” Rick added.

I gaped at him.

“It’s true then?” Rick said.

Idiot! Why didn’t I tell them before?
“I wanted him to stay away from Emily,” I said quietly.

“Which he obviously didn’t do.” Rick’s tone dripped with insinuation.

“You’re blowing this out of proportion.”

“Not from where we stand,” Rick said agreeably.

Helen fingered the charms on her necklace. Without looking up at me, she said, “Ben, tell us what happened the evening you threatened J.D.”

“I went to see Emily about ten days ago,” I said and then hurried to add, “We had arranged to meet, but she must have forgotten because when I got there her door was already open. I walked in and saw her paying J.D. with hundred-dollar bills.” I cleared my throat. “I assumed it was a drug transaction.”

As I carefully recounted my visit to Emily’s apartment for the detectives, I relived the scene in my mind. I remembered standing nose-to-nose with J.D., hearing him breathe and smelling his garlicky breath.

J.D.’s hand drifted down to the gun in his belt. “You got some kind of death wish?” he said as he gripped the weapon’s handle.

Emily stepped between us. She physically pushed us apart and then turned to me, her embarrassment giving way to anger. “Stop it, Ben! You’re jumping to the wrong conclusion.”

I turned on her. “How many times have I heard that from you?”

“Well, this time you are. It’s always shoot first and ask questions later with you, isn’t it?” She turned to face J.D. and handed him the last bill in her hand. “There. That’s all of it. Now go.”

J.D.’s grip eased on his gun. But he looked past Emily and straight into my eyes. “I don’t appreciate being treated like dog crap. Especially by a loose fucking cannon like you.”

“It’s okay,” Emily cooed as she reached up and laid a hand on J.D.’s shoulder. I couldn’t see her face, but I could imagine her flirtatious smile.

J.D. shrugged and broke off eye contact. He took another step away from me and turned his attention to the bills in his hand. He counted the money slowly. When finished, he grunted: “We’re good, Emily.” Then he turned and sauntered toward the door. With a hand on the doorknob, he looked over his shoulder at me. “You only get one free pass, cannon.” Then he left.

Hands on my hips, I stared at Emily in disbelief. She flicked back her bangs, as she often did when frustrated, and then folded her arms across her chest. A moment of cool silence passed. “You want to hear what that was about or would you rather just assume you know?”

“Remember?” I said, unmoved. “I think you’ve worn out your quota of ‘benefits of the doubt’ from me.”

“That was a lifetime ago,” she said quietly.

Her comment stung. “Not for me.”

“Not for me either,” Emily said in a gentler tone. “I meant that I’ve changed, Ben. I’m in the program. I’ve been clean for months now.”

Staring into those vulnerable blue eyes, I wanted to believe her. But I didn’t. “So what were you paying a drug dealer in cash for?”

“My medicine,” she said.

“I thought I was paying for that.”

She took a step closer and touched me softly on the cheek. “You are, Ben. Thank you.”

“So you don’t use a pharmacy?” I grimaced. “You buy them from a drug dealer?”

“Not always.” She pulled her hand from my cheek. “A month’s worth of the prescription costs almost three thousand dollars.”

“But I give you—”

“I know. Some months, with the rent and everything else, I can’t afford to pay it all.” She looked away, humiliated. “I don’t have many other sources of income right now.”

My jaw fell open. “Are you telling me that drug dealers are selling HIV medications now?”

“This one does. At two-thirds their face value.” She sighed. “Some of his other clients get their HIV meds covered by Medicaid.”

I chuckled, partly in relief and partly in disgust. “And they trade them in for the junk?”

Emily nodded.

“Jesus, Emily.” I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around her tightly. “This is what it’s come to. I’m so sorry.”

Emily was quiet in response. I felt the warmth of her face as she buried her head deeper in my shoulder. I heard her sniff once, and I realized she was crying.

Helen and Rick listened to my entire account without interrupting.

“So you were giving Emily money to pay for her HIV treatment?” Rick said, though his tone was anything but admiring.

“For the past five or six months, I’d been supporting her. An interest-free loan, of sorts. My only stipulation was that she had to stay clean.”

Rick’s expression was sheer skepticism. “You’re telling us J.D. was selling Emily black-market HIV drugs he got from other users?”

I nodded.

“Well, doesn’t that just make you proud to be human?” Helen said, flashing a glimpse of her usual self. “What I don’t understand, Ben, is why you didn’t tell us all of this that night.”

“I don’t know. Maybe shock.” I shook my head. “Emily was so private about the illness. She hid her HIV from everyone, family included, for years. Then she started to get sick, spiraling toward AIDS. She needed an antiviral cocktail of drugs, as we call it. She only told me because she needed financial support and medical advice. Even now, it feels like I’m betraying her confidence…her memory.”

“That’s right,” Rick said. “You’re betraying a ghost.”

The anger stirred. I wet my lips, and took a slow breath. “What was there to tell you? I didn’t know anything about J.D. other than that he was a drug dealer. You were going to find that out anyway. How does the rest of it help you?”

“Might help establish motive.” Rick smiled. “You would’ve been plenty pissed if your hard-earned donations were being funneled into coke and crystal meth.”

I picked up my empty cup and twirled it in my hand, resisting the urge to crush it. “Did her autopsy drug screen ever come back?”

Rick looked at Helen. She shook her head. “Her blood was clean.”

Vindication soothed me, but it wasn’t to last.

“And what about your engagement?” Rick asked. “Why did you hide it from us?”

“Habit, I guess,” I said. “We kept it quiet for months after we were engaged. We’d planned to elope and surprise our friends. Then, after it all fell apart, I think we were both a little ashamed. Aside from my brother Aaron, no one ever knew.”

Helen smiled sympathetically. “Ben, you make it tough for us when you conceal this kind of info.”

I nodded without comment, but I wanted to slap myself for the pointless omission.

Rick shifted in his seat. “Just a couple of other things, Benjamin.”

“Okay,” I said, uneasy with his crocodile smile.

“Last Friday night, where were you between eight and ten
P.M.
?”

“I got up from my nap around seven-thirty.”

“Your
nap
?”

“I was working overnight, starting at eleven. Most of us sleep before night shifts,” I explained, “but I like to take long rides before the shift starts. It energizes me.”

“As in a motorcycle?”

“A racing bike…bicycle.” I thought for a moment. “That evening, I did about fifty miles out to SeaTac and back.”

“Alone?”

“There’s only one seat on my bike.”

He nodded, as if appeased.

“Anything else?” I asked.

The two detectives shared a glance. “Listen, Ben, we can clear this misunderstanding up very quickly,” Helen said.

“Oh?” I felt the knot tightening in my belly. “How’s that?”

Rick reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a clear plastic biohazard bag that held a Q-Tip-like swab and a yellow-top bottle. He held up the biological specimen container, drawing out the moment. “We just need a sample of your DNA.”

Dazed, I drove home from my interview with Helen and Rick, grappling with the realization that I’d become the prime suspect in Emily’s murder.

Emily
. The woman who had broken my heart too many times to count. The woman I had loved so deeply that at times I might have killed
for
her. I remembered the closest I’d come to doing so was at the very end of our engagement. And had I followed through, the murder would have been biblical in nature, along the lines of Cain and Abel. That unpleasant incident represented the climax of a love story with too many unpleasant chapters.

Nine months into our clandestine engagement, Emily and I had finally set a date for our elopement that looked as though it might stick. We intended to fly to Hawaii and get married on the same beach on Kauai where we’d spent such a blissful week with Aaron.

We had already had a few false starts on the wedding front. After I caught her snorting coke with Aaron and Kyle, it took five months of sobriety for Emily to regain my trust enough for us to proceed with the planning. Mexico in April had fallen through because of a staffing crisis at my hospital. And we’d called off our Las Vegas plans for July when, in a fit of hysterics, we realized we were about to elope to Vegas and we might have to explain that to our children and grandchildren one day.

Perhaps the pregnancy cemented our intentions, but I’d never been more in love with Emily than that September. With the glow of early pregnancy, she had risen in my eyes from gorgeous to heartachingly beautiful. At times, I became choked up just looking at her untamable crystal blue eyes and perfect flushed features. More than husband and wife, soon we were going to be a family. And male hormones or not, the realization had turned me into a blubbering but happy mess; or as Aaron, the only other person privy to our latest secret, had dubbed me, “the Alan Alda of expectant fathers.”

That evening I was scheduled to work an ER shift, but I’d cajoled a colleague into covering for me. I wanted to surprise Emily with a romantic dinner and the tangible proof (in the form of our plane tickets to Hawaii) that we were actually about to wed. I had an ulterior motive, too: I wanted to bolster her mood. In the past days, she had slipped into a deep funk. Withdrawn and uncharacteristically irritable, Emily wrestled demons I couldn’t see. I wrote it off to a case of combined prewedding jitters and early pregnancy blues.

Unlocking the door to our third-floor condo, I bounded inside, tickets in one hand and roses in the other. “Em,” I called out. “I have our tickets. We can’t back out now!”

No reply. I checked the bedroom and living room, but Emily was nowhere to be seen. Giving up, I headed for the kitchen and grabbed a vase. The perfumed scent of the fresh roses wafted up to me. My mood bordered on euphoric as I cut away the wrapping and balled up the crinkly plastic. I opened the cupboard under the sink and tossed it in the trashcan. I was about to close the door when something caught my eye—a green band hooked onto the inner edge of the trashcan. I recognized it instantly as a patient identification wristband. I reached down, pulled it out, and read the printing on the label.

My euphoria evaporated.

I read the date on the label again, confused and betrayed by its implication. Emily had been an ER patient the previous day at Swedish Hospital when she was supposed to have been visiting her parents on the Olympic Peninsula.

I tried Emily on her cell, but the call went to voicemail. With growing worry, I decided to run the situation by Aaron. Despite his questionable personal choices, he’d always managed to keep a brotherly perspective on the highs and lows in my relationship with Emily.

I didn’t want to have this conversation over the phone, so I headed down to the parking garage and grabbed my road bike from the locker. I cycled the three miles up to Aaron’s townhouse, trying to figure what would have sent Emily to the Emergency Room and forced her to hide it from me. But I was stumped. If it were pregnancy-related, surely she would have told me.

Pulling up to Aaron’s trendy townhouse on Twenty-fifth Street (the mortgage on which would have taxed my professional income to the hilt) I was too preoccupied to care if Aaron’s vague Internet ventures were what really supported his lavish lifestyle.

I locked my bike out front. Not bothering to ring the buzzer, I dug in my pocket for the key to his place and opened the door. The moment I stepped inside, I smelt the slightly acrid smoke. The scent grew stronger with each step up the half flight of stairs to the carpeted living room. I stopped dead at the top of the staircase.

Kneeling in front of the coffee table, Aaron gaped at me, a tiny silver pipe wedged between his lips. Whether from surprise or the crystal meth he was smoking, his eyes were dilated so widely that they appeared entirely black.

“What’s wrong with you?” Emily giggled, her back still to me. She reached to take the pipe from his mouth.

Aaron pulled away from Emily’s hand.

“What’s your problem?” she said impatiently.

Aaron nodded his chin toward me. Emily turned and looked over her shoulder. “Oh, God. Ben!” She jumped to her feet, knocking over the beer bottle on the table, and rushed toward me. She tried to throw her arms around me, but I pushed her away by her chest.

“Ben, it’s just this one time…”

I sidestepped her and marched over to where Aaron sat. He dropped the pipe on the coffee table and rose to his feet to meet me. Our eyes locked; his expression was a mix of shame and defiance.

Without a word, I punched him as hard as I could, my fist smashing into his mouth and throbbing on contact. He stumbled back two steps. Blood erupted from his split lip. I punched him again with my left hand, hitting him in the cheek. This time, he stood his ground but his head whipped to the side and back, spraying me. I had a bitter taste of his blood—my blood—on my tongue.

Aaron stared at me, eyes as obstinate as ever, but he made no effort to fight back. He didn’t even raise his hands to fend off my blows. I cocked my arm to hit him again, when I felt Emily’s fingers wrap around my elbow. I shook my arm loose and spun savagely to face her, my fist poised to hit her.

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did, Ben,” Emily said. She pointed at the miserable, still-smoking crack pipe on the table. “Don’t pin this on Aaron. I wanted this. God, I needed it.”

I dropped my arm. “What the fuck are you thinking?”

“I’m not thinking, Ben,” she whimpered. “I’m not.”

“The baby, Em,” I said. “What about our baby?”

She shook her head and sniffed. “I miscarried yesterday. We lost our baby.” Em covered her face with her palms and wept silently. “I was afraid if you found out you would call off the wedding,” she sobbed. “Ben, we lost our baby.”

We stood inches apart without touching, but I knew that the gulf between us was no longer crossable. My tears dripped down my cheek onto my shirt. “Em,” I said hoarsely. “We’ve lost so much more than that.”

I shook off the melancholy memory as soon I reached home. I stepped into my kitchen and headed for the refrigerator, hoping there was at least one cold beer left inside. I foraged through the shelves, but all I found was a bottle of lemon cooler left over from the last time I’d entertained, months earlier.

I sipped the flavorless drink at the countertop, debating whom to turn to after my run-in with the detectives. I ached for reassurance. I wished Mom were still alive. She had been such a supportive confidante to Aaron and me.

Mom had died four years earlier. The official cause of death was listed as ovarian cancer, but I think the ceaseless stress of nursing Dad through his alcohol-related dementia while having to watch Aaron march down the same path (albeit with a different poison) finally caught up to her. Diagnosed in May, she was dead by July. Though she was only sixty-one, I don’t think she had any fight left in her. In a way, I was relieved Mom didn’t live to suffer through the death of one son and now the incrimination of the other.

With nowhere else to turn, I phoned St. Jude’s and asked for Alex. She agreed to meet after her shift without questioning why I needed to see her again so soon.

After hanging up, I headed out for my second ride of the day, though neither the cycle nor the long bath following it did much to relax my brittle nerves.

I met Alex half an hour before midnight at the Hudson Room on Fourth Avenue, the spot we used to frequent before the San Francisco “incident.” The funky overpriced bar was at best a third full. We chose a booth in the corner, as far away as possible from the hip-hop music echoing across the nearly deserted dance floor.

Alex drank an herb tea. I needed something with more kick, but by the bottom of my second scotch, I felt no more settled. When the ice cubes grazed my lips and I tasted only water, I put down the glass. Then I unloaded the entire story on her, beginning with the day I agreed to financially support Emily’s anti-HIV drugs and ending with a recap of my recent police interview.

Alex appraised me for several seconds before saying a word. Finally, she shook her head slowly. “Why didn’t you give them a DNAsample?”

“My head was swimming by that point.” I waved to our waitress and pointed to my empty glass. “I was already guilty in Rick’s eyes. And Helen was leaning that way, too.”

She held up her palm. “Even more reason to give the sample.”

“Maybe, but something feels very wrong.”

“How so?”

“I never told anyone about the night I confronted J.D. and Emily. So how did Rick and Helen find out?”

Alex sipped her tea before answering. “Maybe a neighbor overheard you?”

“Right. The same neighbor who called me at the crack of dawn to taunt me about it in a whisper.”

Alex viewed me with more patience than I deserved. “You’re getting too keyed up, Ben. Why don’t you just give them the sample and be done with it?”

I tore at a cocktail napkin. “The blood on Emily’s wall was AB-negative.”

Alex lips tightened, and a flicker of doubt crossed her eyes. “It’s not your blood, is it, Ben?”

I swallowed. “Alex, I wasn’t there that night.”

Her face creased into a slight frown. She put her tea down slowly. “Are you saying you bled on her wall some other time?”

I shook my head. “I never bled on her wall. Not that night. Not ever.”

She nodded. The skin at the edges of her lips and eyes relaxed. A smile fluttered across her lips. “Then what’s there to worry about, Ben?”

More than her words, her relaxed body language brought me some comfort. I dredged up my first smile of the evening. “I don’t know. I guess I’m getting paranoid. There seem to be so many coincidences. And then the blood of Emily’s alleged killer turns out to be my rare blood type….”

“So what’s your next step?”

“I think I should talk to a lawyer.”

She shook her head in surprise. “A criminal defense attorney?”

“Yeah.”

She eyed me skeptically but didn’t argue. She checked her watch. “Ben, I better get home to Talie. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night and crawls into my bed. She’ll wonder where I am.” She chuckled. “And Dad won’t hear her if she gets up. He snores like a jackhammer on overdrive.”

“You go,” I said. Emboldened by the scotch, I reached out and clutched her hand, squeezing a bit too long and tenderly. “Thank you, Alex. For everything.”

She smiled and gently freed her hand from my grip. She stood up and hurried off without another word.

Sitting alone, I drained another scotch before I asked for the bill. The cute redheaded waitress with the sprinkling of freckles and a diamond nose stud strutted up to the table carrying the bill. Wearing a tight black T-shirt, she leaned a little closer than necessary when she deposited the bill on the table. “Did you lose your friend?” She flashed me an open-mouthed smile.

I wasn’t sure whether she was hitting on me or this was an attempt beef up her tip. Regardless, I had little energy to respond. I forced a grin. “She had to go home. So do I, now.”

A little tipsy, I wandered outside and flagged down a cab. I was thankful the older driver with the downcast eyes didn’t attempt to engage me in conversation. I was too tired to carry on a superficial chat about the ungodly price of gas or the Sonics’ latest woes.

Opening my door, I heard the electronic machine-gun blast of beeps from my ringing phone. The hallway clock read 1:15
A.M.
My pulse quickened. The ringing stopped by the time I reached the phone. Hesitantly, I scrolled back through the call display, which read
CANADA
for the most recent call.

I was still holding the receiver in my hand when I felt it vibrate even before I heard the ring.
CANADA
flashed on the call display. I hesitated a moment and then brought the receiver to my ear.

“Benjamin.”

The single whispered word set my heart sprinting. “What do you want?”

“To warn you.”

“Warn me about what?”

“The blood.”

My throat turned to sand. I knew exactly what he meant. “What blood?”

“On Emily’s wall.”

I froze in place; a statue couldn’t have been stiller.

“It’s your blood, Benjamin.”