chapter forty-seven

The image of Denver’s stricken face accompanied me as I made my way along Venice Beach to the Theban Grill. More than ever, I wanted to pick the brain of Jim Mar, the crime lab serologist, and I’d finally managed to track him down. Jim was just back from vacation, and he agreed to meet as soon as he got off work. The aroma of grilled calamari and rosemary chicken kabobs wafted towards me as I walked.

Sandwiched between a henna and hemp store and the parking lot filled with laughing thong-clad hover-boarders, the grill was the last stop on the boardwalk.

A girl about Denver’s age sat on the beach directly in front of the café. She wore a ragged dress and rocked an imaginary baby in her arms as she stared at the waves.

I tried to focus on the case as I slid onto the seat behind a metal picnic table to the side of the grill. A showboating hover-boarder had barely circled around me twice flashing his porcelain veneers when I spotted Jim walking towards me.

Jim rolled his eyes at the hover-boarder as he showed off the fluorescent derma ad for a gay bar inked on his back before heading off.

Jim was over forty, but today he vibed a good decade younger.

“You look rested,” I said with a little more edge than intended. “Good vacation?”

He dumped his bag on a seat opposite me. Jim turned his face, giving me exaggerated right and left profiles in turn. “What do you think? A little nano-fill here, micro-lift there, and good-bye mid-life crisis. Don’t judge, Eddie. You’re too young to know what it’s like. Tell me about this file you’ve been pestering me about.”

“Did you read it?”

He raised his left eyebrow almost as high as his Regenerexed hairline. “It’s my first day back. I was about to when I got your very impatient call to meet.”

“Read it now.” I re-forwarded him the file from Dr. Lee, which Denver had decoded.

Jim sighed. “Why do all the really good-looking men only want me for my brain?” He started to read. What he read didn’t take long to engross him.

Jim didn’t look up even when the waiter returned with our drinks and plunked them on the table. He took a sip and kept reading.

I poured water from the pitcher into my ouzo and watched clouds form in the clear liquid. As I waited, I looked around. Everywhere I looked, vacant-eyed teens and twenty-somethings wandered aimlessly among the rest of us. There seemed to be more of them every day. But the weirdest thing wasn’t the afflicted. It was the way they disappeared in plain sight. People just averted their eyes and went on with their lives like they do with the homeless. Would Denver soon be one of the hollow-eyed wanderers?

Suddenly, I wasn’t hungry. When the server brought the food, I picked at my grilled calamari just to have something to do.

Jim dug into his lamb as he kept reading. “Wow,” he said. “Is this for real?”

“What exactly did Lee discover? Be specific.”

“Genetic research for Alzheimer’s X, the genes that make people vulnerable.”

“So, he could predict it years before the disease manifested.” That had to be Lee’s original D-design patent. That wasn’t news. That was the test Denver had just taken.

Jim nodded. “It gets better. Eddie, I think this guy Lee found somebody whose DNA is resistant.”

I sat up a little straighter. “Someone genetically immune to the disease?”

Jim cocked his head to the side. “Well, highly resistant to it at least.” He took a big swallow of his Wine Dark drink. “Scientists have known for years which gene on the nineteenth chromosome makes people vulnerable to regular Alzheimer’s. We’ve also known that a defective APP gene on chromosome twenty-one is associated with early onset Alzheimer’s.”

“Alzheimer’s X, you mean?” I asked.

“The forerunner,” Jim corrected. “According to this, Lee also discovered certain drugs create variations in the epigenome—causing inflammation and the wrong kind of protein manufacture in genetically susceptible people.”

“Which drugs?”

“Green Ice and Blue Lotus.”

I leaned forward. “So Alz-X is triggered by ice and spice—like marijuana turns on schizophrenia.”    

“Worse,” he said. “They catalyze the disease in genetically susceptible people. People who might have gotten Alzheimers in their eighties now get a more virulent senile dementia in their teens. Welcome to Alzheimer’s X.”

Jim took a bite of the lamb and chewed thoughtfully before continuing. “But if this guy Lee’s on the level,” Jim said, tapping his forefinger on the metal table, “he engineered a treatment based on the resistant genome.”

“A cure?”

“Better,” Jim said. “Immunization would derail the disease before it takes hold. People don’t even get sick.”

That had to be the additional improvement Lee had registered with his AI patent. And Lee held the rights to both the diagnostic test for Alz-X and the patented cure. Or he did until he died.

“Who’s the miracle resistor?”

“The source is identity blind.” Jim pointed to a footnote in the article thick with unfamiliar numbers. No way to know whose it is just from Lee’s file.”

Jim’s eyes met mine as we both stared at the Devonshire girl’s blood spot in the case file. It wasn’t much of a stretch to think the DNA we were staring at wasn’t just a link in the chain, but the whole double helix, the source of the resistant genome.

“How long will it take you to compare the genome in this file with both the partial prelim and Britney’s blood from the autopsy?” I said.

“A day. I’ll want to run it twice to confirm.”

“Make it half a day.” I signaled the waiter for the check.

“Wait, Eddie.” Jim leaned in towards me, his voice lowering to a whisper. “What company was this guy affiliated with? Are they going public?” Jim was already tapping his glove phone to start up a new search.

“Jim.” I shut down his glove phone. “This has to be on the QT for now.”

“This is a once in the lifetime opportunity,” Jim said.

“It’s a murder investigation.”

Jim frowned. “I won’t tell anybody. You have my word on that.”

I knew I couldn’t keep Jim from acting on the information for long. “How soon could this come to market? Soon enough to help somebody just diagnosed?” Somebody like Denver?

“Maybe. But the disease moves fast. FDA trials don’t. Where are they in the process?” Jim made a clicking sound with his tongue as the server scanned my barcode for the tab. “It takes nine years for a drug to make it to market.” We both stood to go.

“Hurry,” I said.

I headed straight to my Porsche. Jim didn’t even glance in Tan Hover-boarder’s direction as he backed his gray electric Honda out of the parking lot and gunned it towards the lab.

A finding this big, a finding that led to immunization, could mean billions, not just millions. That kind of money caused people to do all sorts of desperate things. Like kill a stripper when she found out the true value of her genome and tried to muscle in on the profit. And anybody who got in the way, like Lee, Frank, or me, would also fall in the acceptable losses column. Especially with the Aztekas involved . . .

I punched the ignition, put the car on autopilot, and called Shin with the update. His floating image showed me Shin was still at Nokia, but had stepped outside for some air. He stood next to one of those headless torso sculptures of black steel standing sentinel round police headquarters.

“We’ll have to subpoena Lee’s will,” Shin said. “Find out whether the family or the company inherits the rights to the patents.”

“I have a call into Lee’s boss. He should be able to give us some answers. And Jim should have the blood work done by end of day tomorrow.”

“Good,” Shin said. “I’ll get the warrant for the Baby Mine clinic first thing in the morning.” He paused2. “The AzteKas.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They wouldn’t be too keen on word getting out that Green Ice and Blue Lotus catalyze Alz-X. Those are their top sellers. Maybe they hoped taking out Britney and Lee might delay or derail the news getting out.”

“That explains why they deviated from their usual M.O. too,” Shin said. “Making both deaths look like accidents draws attention away from their involvement.”

“But taking out Lee also delays the cure. The cure would be good for them.”

My partner cocked his head to the side. “Let’s find out who gets those patents,” Shin said.

Though still early, night was already closing in as I made the drive back to the hotel. The Santa Anas were wailing through the city like ghosts lost in high rise corridors and canyons. Halloween was just two days away, and decorations had sprung up everywhere. Little orange lights glowed; paper ghosts fluttered, and fake gravestones pushed up through the ground in suburban front yards.

“God, listen to those Santa Anas,” Shin said. “Creepy. You know some people think Halloween’s the time when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest.”

Listening to the wail of the winds, I thought they might be on to something. The city’s chorus of ghosts seemed to be crying out louder than ever tonight.

Maybe that’s just a homicide detective’s view of the city. Whereas civilians navigated by landmarks like a new Starbucks or a familiar gas station, for me the streets were marked by the bodies found on the scene: a robbery homicide at that Arco, a domestic dispute that ended with two dead a block away. Blood shadows haunted me at every turn.

An irritating buzz from my Nokia Handy interrupted my reverie and the car vid-chat with Shin.

“Gotta take this.” I angled the glove-phone so Shin could see the Caller ID on his screen.

The incoming caller was Harvey Pink.