Working with Ms. Shard, Nettie found more than thirty receipts from the two Twin Cities blood banks where Andrew Shard had been donating blood. The immediate problem was that he’d used different identities at each of the locations.
“Start with the location where he used his own name,” Mars said. “It’ll save us a pile of trouble proving that it was Andrew Shard who donated.”
“Bit of luck, there,” Nettie said. “He used his own name at a blood bank on University Avenue. And that was his most recent spill—which, I hope, will give us a better chance his blood is still around.”
“Spill?”
“I made that up,” Nettie said. “Thought it sounded like a cool way to describe blood donation.”
By late afternoon on Monday, Nettie was back. “How would you like some bad news-bad news-bad news-good news?” Nettie was giving Mars the kind of grin she used only when things were going very, very well.
“One out of four ain’t bad.”
“Bad news: the blood Andrew Shard donated was used three weeks ago in a kidney transplant.”
“I’m having a hard time figuring how you’re going to get from that to good news.”
“You’re going to love this. I’m thinking, maybe the blood bank transferred the blood to the hospital, maybe the patient is still there, and maybe the hospital is holding on to some of the blood in case the patient needs another transfusion. I call the hospital with the ID information I got from the blood bank. Bad news: the blood’s gone. Not even an empty plastic pack in the fridge we could scrape. I hang up. Then I start thinking really creative. You transfuse a guy with another guy’s blood. What’s the chance that if we drew blood from the patient, we’d see a DNA profile for the blood donor?”
Mars sat up straight. “Damn it, Nettie. Before you’re done, you’re going to make one hell of a street cop.”
Nettie raised a hand to hold him off. “I call the transplant surgeon, tell him what I’m thinking. The guy was blown away—but, bad news: in three weeks’ time, there’s not going to be any donor blood in the patient. We would have had to draw blood within eight hours of the transfusion to have a fair shot at finding any cells for the donor.”
Mars was into it. He slapped both hands on the desk. “So then you said.”
Nettie nodded emphatically, her grin wider than ever. “I said, ‘Well, wouldn’t you draw blood on a patient right after they had major surgery, and like a couple more times in the next eight hours?’ And the doc says, ‘You bet we would. And what’s more, this was a protocol patient,’ meaning they’re using specific treatments that require record retention for research purposes. The doc said we had a very good shot that the blood drawn immediately following surgery was being retained under the treatment protocols.”
“And the good news: you’ve confirmed that it is.”
“Exactly. But we’re not home free. Separating donor cells
from the patient’s cells is not going to be a cakewalk. I talked to the state crime lab just before you got back. They won’t touch it. Recommended we send our blood to a lab in Richmond, California. Even then, no guarantees they can do the separation without damaging the cells.”
“Why the hell not? They do it all the time when we have two victims’ blood at crime scenes.”
“You’re forgetting. Shard was a donor for this patient because they had the same blood type. Apparently that complicates separation. What we have working for us is we’ve got plenty of blood to work with. But it’s going to take time.”
“Time is what we’ve got, given that we don’t know where Cook is.”
“More to the point is that we don’t know how we’re going to find out where Cook is.”
Mars had a dinner scheduled with Karen Pogue for the following week. Wanting the stimulus of discussing the case with her, he suggested instead that they meet that night at the Village Wok. It was a straight shot for Mars from city hall to the Wok on Washington and just around the corner from Karen’s university office. Karen was there ahead of him and had ordered for them both: duck in black bean sauce and a whole steamed walleye.
“What’s on your mind?” Karen asked, between chopsticks full of duck.
“We’re finally getting solid evidence on the Fitzgerald case.”
“Oh, God. I really led you down the garden path on that one, didn’t I? How bad did I screw you up?”
Mars shook his head. “What you said was on the mark for what I described. And our suspect set the crime scene up to look like a sexual perversion was the motive. The problems were on my side. We just didn’t have what we needed on
motive until three days ago. Now all I’ve got to do is find our suspect. He went off the Stone Arch Bridge Friday afternoon. Yesterday we found a body downriver that suggests our suspect survived the jump and killed another guy to use as a decoy. The question is, if he did, how do we figure out where he is?”
“Good question,” Karen said. “What does a guy like that do if he survives? How does he even get out of town?”
“He had cash. We know that. What happens next is up for grabs.”
Karen tapped her chopsticks on her plate. “How is it I haven’t seen anything in the paper about the guy he killed?”
“We’ve been holding back on that. Waiting for positive identification on the floater we pulled out of the river yesterday.”
Karen said, “I bet your perp would love to know you found his decoy. Probably break his heart you didn’t fall for it.”
It came to Mars all at once. He knew exactly what he needed to do. Despite his late arrival he needed to leave early. He picked up the check as he went. “I’m really sorry—but what you just said. I’ve got something I’ve got to do right away. This one’s on me,” he said, squeezing Karen’s shoulder.
Karen called after him, “Let me know what happens.”
Mars drove back downtown over the Washington Avenue Bridge, turning left off Fourth Street onto Portland. With any luck, he’d catch Ray Bunt putting tomorrow’s edition of the Star Tribune to bed.
Bunt was a hard-edged former police-beat reporter for the Strib. He had, in his own words, been kicked out of the real world and was senior editor of the Metro-State Section of the paper. Every time Mars saw him, Bunt was heavier, grayer, and more cynical.
“Hey! The heat is here!” Bunt called out when he saw Mars coming across the city room of the paper. “Please, please, say you’re here to tell me my second wife has met an untimely death … .”
Mars said, “Cracks like that can get you in trouble down the road, buddy.”
“Some trouble is worth having. I take it you’re not bearing glad tidings?”
“Need a favor. Somewhere we can talk?”
Seated in a glass cubicle, Mars said, “I need you to run something in the Metro-State Section, as soon as possible.”
Bunt squinted at Mars across the desk. “You asking me to run something that isn’t true in my section, my paper?”
Mars said, “I’m asking you to run something that is true right now. My guess is that in the next few weeks, it won’t be true. But based on evidence in hand right now, it’s one hundred percent true.”
“You’re gonna have to tell me what it is you want me to run and what basis you’ve got for saying it’s true right now.”
“I want you to run a piece that says a body’s been recovered from the Mississippi. That identification on the body indicates that the victim is Owen Cook, a British citizen who is known to have fallen from the Stone Arch Bridge last Friday. That’s it. Couple paragraphs will do just fine.”
Bunt stared at him. “And you think in a couple weeks you’re going to have evidence that the body isn’t Cook?”
“That’s it exactly.”
“But Boy Scout’s honor, as we speak, evidence suggests it is Cook.”
“Well, his undershorts didn’t look right to me, but other than that …”
Bunt took this as a joke, which is what Mars intended. Bunt waved Mars away. “Don’t see why we can’t do that.”
He turned his wrist to look at his watch. “We’ve missed tomorrow’s paper. Wednesday is gonna be the earliest we can go.”
Mars said, “I could use one more day to get ready. Wednesday is fine.”
Bunt said, “Am I gonna be interested in who the floater is when your new evidence comes home?”
“There’s going to be a lot to keep you interested when my new evidence comes home.”
“And I assume your call list is in alphabetical order?” Meaning, that the Minneapolis Star Tribune would get a call before the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch.
“Count on it,” Mars said.