Unlucky in Law (23 page)

Phil and Ginger rolled eyes at each other. “Finish that paper on Milton yet, Dick?”

“Turned it in this morning.”

“Ever consider studying a real subject, the kind of thing that might get you a real job someday, like, say, pathology?”

“The smells coming out of your lab say it's not for me.” The video clicked off.

“They ought to fire that guy,” Phil muttered as she pushed the clipboard back toward him.

“Helps to be the landlord's son. Anyway, we've got you, Phil. He's just dressing.” She didn't care if Dick was listening. He hated the job, and didn't mind saying so.

“What you doing in so late, anyway?”

“What do you think?”

“Hard to imagine what's so goldang urgent about dead people,” he said, “that it should keep you up at night.”

Ginger walked past his desk, hit the elevator button, and waited, listening to the elevator moving through space without giving a hint of its whereabouts. A clunk, and the doors opened abruptly. She got in. More mirrors inside gave her a chance to adjust her blue denim miniskirt. She liked it riding low. Although she worked in a lab, she had never owned a white lab coat. Most of the consultants who shared facilities on her floor, all forensics experts who had formed a consortium a few years ago, did wear a uniform, however: jeans and T-shirts, jeans and dress shirts, jeans and blouses, jeans and tank tops.

Her concession to pragmatism was to wear a red faux-leather apron, the better to keep herself clean as she went about her messy business.

She didn't like working late but her new girlfriend kept strange hours, and hadn't been home when she called. She could give Nina's case some extra time. She touched her new gold ear cuff, which hurt more than her other piercings, and reminded herself to douse it in alcohol when she finally did get home. She knew only too well what an infection looked like when it got to tearing through a body's system.

She might be here for hours. She stepped out of the elevator into the hall, where she had hung a jolly painting by an artist named Hans Bellmer who liked to mix up female body parts.

Ginger was a forensic pathologist, not a priest or a detective, but it was human to seek explanations, and curiosity had kept her awake a few nights since that meeting with Nina, when her lover hadn't. If Nina's client had in fact committed the murder, the crime scene made sense. If he hadn't, the evidence was somehow misleading them. With the certainty of a person who relied on science and reason for explanations, she felt illumination lurked inside those bits of DNA in the blood from the victim's apartment, but after two weeks of looking she still had no answer to her questions.

She was supposed to testify for the defense within the next few days, and she had nothing for them yet.

Unlocking the door to her lab with a key, she decided that was exactly why she liked Nina's jobs. When Nina worked a case, she took the dross nobody else found interesting and, with the fire of a fanatic, made it fascinating, whether you believed or not. So she wasn't going to let the little matter of an old man's dry bones stop her from figuring out whatever there was to figure out.

Her lab was large, about eight hundred square feet, which she couldn't have afforded if she was on her own. She shared it with several other people: Jimmy, the HPLC wizard; Carol, the toxicologist, who did chromatography on suspect drugs and used tissue samples to find traces of poison or drugs; and Kevan, their resident blood-man. He did ELISA's and radio-immuno assays to determine blood types and find useful proteins that might be present in a sample. She flipped on the banks of color-corrected overhead lights, illuminating slab benches made of black epoxy with a matte finish in varying states of disarray.

Jimmy had her beat in sheer weight of shiny chrome machinery, but only by a little. Ginger's bench held a clutter of equipment including the thermocycler, which looked like a hot plate or waffle iron, and sat on a toaster-sized computer. A matrix of little holes in the top held bullet tubes that replicated the molecules of DNA. Over one whole wall a narrow strip of windows, black now, looked out into the night. The other walls were an assortment of glass-closed cupboards and open shelving with lips to prevent the chemicals stored in brown glass bottles from jumping off the shelves in an earthquake.

From the wall hung a blue Calder mobile, kept turning by the awesome air conditioning, and on the back wall by the bathroom she had hung another painting, this one by a visionary named Alex Grey who painted human bodies sans skin. Like the Bellmer, it combined technical virtuosity with art, which was exactly what Ginger saw as her goal in her work.

She replaced a bottle of ethidium bromide on the shelf, pushed the thermocycler back, and tidied other miscellaneous things away, making room. On her bench, the two Zhukovsky bones lay neatly on white paper, like museum relics. She flipped on the radio and pulled up a stool and began to work.

She heard a key in the lock, and wondered who else had decided to work late. It could be any one of them. All four were night owls. “Jimmy?” she said, but there was no answer. He probably was wearing his headphones, which the group had insisted upon once they heard the maniacal screeching he called brain candy. She turned back to her notes. What was she missing? Somewhere in this sheaf of material, was there a message that would direct them to an understanding of what occurred on that April night?

Nina believed her client. Ginger believed her evidence. The blood of Stefan Wyatt matched the blood found on the glass fragments. Her tests confirmed it.

As for the bones, the DNA profile of the old man held no unusual medical facts or mysterious anomalies. He was normal, and he was dead of natural causes.

What else was there to find out about him? She put the two sheets side by side, staring at the black-and-white grids until her eyes pulled them together into one stereo image.

Somebody was behind her. Ginger, tuned to danger through countless classes in self-defense and a violence-speckled childhood only another Japanese-American girl who preferred girls to boys could fully imagine, felt her undefended neck prickle. She whipped around, bending a leg back at the same moment, didn't like what she saw, and kicked with boots on.

19

Thursday 9/25

N
O TRIAL IS COMPLETE WITHOUT ITS DISASTER DREAMS, AND
although Nina kept a clamp on her anxieties during the day, even acting downright cocky whenever she came upon Jaime Sandoval on the stairway, her dreams humbled her, reminding her that she was mortal, that they were all mortal, even Judge Salas, whom she had killed off at least once, and also that showing up in court was not good enough; she needed to be dressed.

Between nightmares, she did not sleep much on Thursday night. Paul's presence in her bed would have helped, but Aunt Helen's house was small. After the first night they were all together there, Bob had complained, “The walls are so thin. I can hear him—sneeze. He's really loud. You're loud, too.” Nina knew what he was hearing, and it wasn't fall allergies. Bob was fourteen, too smart to pacify with white lies and too young to leave at home alone all night, so most of the time she was left to her ruminations, conscious and unconscious, and her insomnia.

On this night, Thursday, she had fought with Paul. He had told her about San Francisco, ending with Giorgi's ambulance ride. “I had to stay with him. Couldn't leave,” he fretted.

“You did the right thing. But now things are getting really rough, Paul.”

“Krilov's gone, and if he went to Sacramento to find Ginger, he's way ahead of me.”

She knew Paul. What made her afraid made him furious. “That's what phones are for. Have you tried the lab?”

“An after-hours recording.”

“And you left a message on her cell phone, I assume.”

“What exactly do you think I've been doing up here? Weaving baskets?”

“How about her family? Have they seen her?”

“I've spoken with people who haven't seen her skinny, tight leather ass in years! Where the hell is she?”

“Calm down . . .” It was probably just as well she couldn't decipher the words that followed her suggestion. “Maybe you should come back here tonight.”

“Right. I'll hide under your bed. Smart thinking, Nina.”

“Maybe you should call me when you get over yourself!”

The phone clicked, and he was gone.

About three o'clock in the morning, after driving off a bridge at Big Sur and finding it difficult to open the windows once the car was submerged in the Pacific, Nina gave up her nightly battle for rest and made herself a cup of coffee. She pushed open the creaky living room window and looked out at the empty street, smelling the salt of the ocean and listening to its whispers.

The phone rang.

A phone ringing at three o'clock in the morning is not like a phone at any other time of day. It bawled through the house, more frightening and piercing than a child screaming in distress, a siren announcing imminent calamity. She stumbled, running to stop it. “Hello?”

“Ms. Reilly? This is Carol Elliott. I share a lab with Dr. Hirabayashi.”

“Ginger?”

“I know she's been doing some time-sensitive work for you, and I thought I should call. Also, I didn't want you hearing about it in the media tomorrow without some warning.”

“Hearing what? Where's Ginger? Why isn't she calling?”

“She can't. I'm calling from the hospital. Someone broke into the building where we work. He stabbed the guard on duty, stole his keys, and ransacked our lab. Ginger's still unconscious.”

Nina touched the scar on her chest, cold, remembering. “Was she stabbed?”

“No, although I wasn't sure at first when I found her. She put up one hell of a fight. The lab's wrecked.” She must have realized how frightening this sounded, so she went on hastily, “He hit her in the forehead with something and knocked her out. She's had a mild concussion. She has a cracked rib and a black eye. But she'll be fine.”

“Thank God. How's the guard?”

“He took some serious cuts on the arms and hands, but he'll make it. Another guard saw the attack happening and called for help right away. Unfortunately, nobody came quick enough to catch the guy that got Ginger.”

Horror tugged at Nina. Ginger could have been killed. “Who did this? Do the police know?”

“They don't know who and they don't know why. They seem to think maybe someone was looking for drugs. There's a surveillance video but the police said it wasn't helpful. He was wearing a mask.”

“Were any drugs stolen?”

“Nothing that we could determine.”

She puzzled over the information. “Was anything taken?”

“Nothing of value, although it did look like her bench had been swept clean.”

“What was on it?”

“As far as I can remember, bones. Labeled as being from you. That's why I called. I'm assuming the bones were taken by this intruder. I told the police and gave them your number.”

Bones, again. What was the story on these damnable bones? “When can I talk to her?”

“Tomorrow morning. They want her to rest.”

“Should I come up? I'm only a few hours away.”

“No, really, you can't do anything. I wish I could tell you more, but I just got here.”

“You've heard something,” Paul said, once he was awake enough to answer his phone. Nina explained about Ginger. When she was finished, he said, “Shit. This is my fault.”

“You couldn't have prevented this.”

“She was up against a pro. Amazing that she survived.”

“She practices karate three times a week. She fought like crazy, probably kept herself alive. You're sure it was Krilov? The Russian?”

“It was the Russian.”

“The bones, Paul. Why would Sergey Krilov take them? Why are they worth a guard's life, a priest's life, a doctor's life? He's gone on some sort of rampage. I'm calling Alex Zhukovsky again.”

“I think the rampage is over,” Paul said. “He wanted the bones, and he has them. Have the Sacramento police call me too when they get in touch. I can't believe I let that bastard touch Ginger.”

Friday morning Nina made a few calls, then got Bob off to school, which wasn't simple.

“I hate this school. I hate all the kids.”

“Why don't you make more of an effort?” she said. She was making his lunch, slapping blackberry jelly and peanut butter on wheat bread, tossing a bag of chips and a milk carton in the brown bag. Ordinarily, he made his own lunch, but when he was this contrary, he would go without rather than compromise. “Join a club. Get involved in fund-raising for the cross-country team. People are the same everywhere, you know. It's not a regional thing.”

“I disagree,” he said, folding his arms. “Here they are all the same. They wear the same stupid Carmel clothes. They like the same jerk music and the same lame movies. They grew up together and I'm a freak and I hate it, Mom.”

He would not go, he informed her, refusing to eat, refusing to dress, and finally, refusing to get into the car until she threatened him with various punishments, and one finally caught his attention. “Get in that car now,” she said, “or I will take away your music. I will take away your computer and I will dump it in a ravine!”

One thing she had done right with him. She never made promises she didn't fully intend to keep, and he knew it. He dragged around, but he got dressed and made it outside.

All the way there, while he maintained a silence as noxious and pervasive as the fumes spewing from the garbage truck up ahead, she agreed with him in her heart. For sensitive souls, such was high school. But if he was that kind of boy, it would probably prove just as hellacious at Tahoe.

After she dropped him at the school, forcing him to lean in for the kiss he was still just young enough not to refuse her, she parked on the street and tried calling the hospital. They found Ginger right away.

“Hey, you,” she said. “They shaved a perfect bald square very neatly in the hair above my forehead so they could dress the cut,” she said. “Normally, I might consider it a serendipitous style-statement, but I just got a really good haircut, damn it.”

“How are you?”

“Leaving as soon as they unhook the IV.”

“The guard's doing okay.”

“I heard. Phil fought back. And the funny thing is, this kid, this loser, the other guard? He was quick enough to get people there that got Phil help, and interrupted the attack on me, without risking his own skin. Phil's saving for a houseboat so he and his wife can spend their golden years floating around on Lake Shasta, drinking mai tais. Right this second, I'm motivated to join them.”

“What happened, exactly?”

“I knocked the knife out of his hand, I do remember that, but there were too many potential weapons in our lab, turns out. He whacked me on the head with the ezda, I'm told, although I jumped away and avoided serious damage. I hope I got his nuts good, at least.”

“The ezda? What's that?”

“That bum, Kevan, talked us into buying an ESDA a couple of months ago. It's an electrostatic device that detects indented writing on questionable documents. It's as big as a portable copy machine, so this guy is strong.”

“Did you get a look at him?”

“No. He had a ski mask on. Somebody ought to outlaw those things, or at least register the name of any purchasers. I wish I knew who it was, because I consider our business unfinished. And I don't like pending business.”

“We know—we think we know who attacked you, Ginger.”

“Great. I've got a pen. Just give me his address and I'll take care of the rest.”

“His name is Sergey Krilov. He's involved in our case, although I'm not sure how. We don't know where he is. Anyway, you leave him to the police, Ginger.”

“Speaking of that, the police asked Carol to make a list of what's missing from the lab, and it's pretty clear what Krilov wanted, Nina, since he took every single thing on my bench.”

“He wanted the bones.”

“Yep.”

“And he got them.”

“Yep.” But Ginger sounded almost blithe, and Nina thought, she must be on Vicodin.

“Shit,” Nina said. “Now I'm more sure than ever—”

“Don't fret, baby, he didn't get everything. Just before he arrived, I decided to do another marrow extraction. I took fresh samples. I stored them in the fridge. I asked Carol to check this morning. Still there, frosty as they ought to be.”

“Really?”

“No shit.”

“That's a great break!”

“The son of a bitch missed 'em. Yippee! We still don't know why the bones are important, but it's more obvious than ever that they are. I have new test results. I wish I could tell you what they meant. I can't. Yet.”

“Right.” That meant Nina should cancel the appointment she had rushed to make this morning with Jaime. She had thought, with the bones missing, there was a chance she could get some time out of him, more time to develop their case. Since they still had marrow, that wouldn't play.

“Ginger, this is important. Don't tell anyone you have the marrow. That's between you, me, and Paul.”

“And Carol. She's cool. I'll need new copies of the DNA profiles for our defendant and victim from you. They're gone.”

“Done.” She made a note for Sandy to send copies immediately.

“I've run some new tests on the marrow, and I'm getting some good ideas. Sorry I can't say what yet. I'm not sure I even remember. But the results weren't lying on my bench, they were on the counter by the fridge, and Carol has 'em safe. Is that cool or what?”

“That's very cool. Do you feel able to stay on the phone with me a few more minutes? I have a strange little angle we're working.” Nina filled her in on what she and Paul had been thinking, that there might be a Romanov link. “Is there any way you could compare his DNA to that family?”

“Maybe if I had several months, a translator, and a bunch of politicians smoothing the way.”

“Oh. I didn't know it would be so hard.”

“One of those pretenders to the throne has been trying to compare his DNA with the DNA of one of the Romanov family dukes for years,” Ginger said. “It's a political thing.”

“I guess the Romanovs are getting sick of all the Anastasia descendants out there.”

“Something else strange,” Ginger said.

“What's that?”

“I'm forgetting something important. It's a creepy feeling, like old age sneaking up on me. I had a thought and lost it.”

“You have a concussion,” Nina reminded her.

“Maybe—maybe even an insight. Damn.”

“It'll come to you.” Nina heard rustling on the other end of the phone.

“The IV's out,” Ginger said, “and I am out of here. I'm going back to the lab to survey the damage. I'll call you later.”

“Is the doctor there? Did the doctor say you could leave?”

“Nobody's here except me.”

“You took out the IV yourself?”

“See, that's why I work with dead people. They are so much more patient than the living.”

Paul met Nina in front of the Salinas courthouse at nine. “He's been following the trial,” he said, after moving in for a kiss and receiving a distracted peck on the cheek.

“Who?”

“Krilov. He left the minute he heard there were still bones out there.”

Nina set down her case and adjusted one elegant shoe. “I suspect a political connection to Russia, Paul, and he's our link. He was Christina's lover; Father Giorgi knows him; he comes from an important family. We've got to find him.”

“Oh, I'll find him.”

“Let's assume Constantin was a page to the royal family, as he claimed. Maybe he knew something—important. Maybe he knew something about their deaths. Maybe he was a witness? And Sergey's family—but why would any of this matter all of a sudden? This all happened nearly a century ago.”

“I hate to admit it, but I don't know much about Russian history.”

“Take a look at my research, okay?” she said, checking her watch and smoothing her hair. “Sandy has copies. What I told you is a little sketchy. I've got to go.”

She turned and left, forgetting to kiss him good-bye. What a relationship, Paul thought. How could she leave without that last kiss? They might never meet again. She should be able to tell the news media, when he croaked that day in a high-speed crash, I told him how much I loved him.

Paul paid a king's ransom for a large cup of coffee, stopped by Nina's office to pick up her handwritten research notes, then went to his office, once again conducting an exhaustive study of the paperwork in the case. He reviewed the old reports, and sure enough, found a mention of Sergey Krilov in the report Dean Trumbo had filed with Klaus several months before. At last, he had an excuse to track the bastard down.