THE INDIGO VALLEY Blood Center was located in an anonymously modern building, heaped with other, similarly nondescript structures into a medical office park. One-stop shopping for anything from a person’s first days to last, and all points in between, as long as there was a physical, mental, or emotional problem which a trained professional could hope to repair or manage. Usually at a high price, of course—med school didn’t come cheap, Ray knew from experience, and every doctor wanted to pay back student loans in a hurry, the sooner to reap the rewards of intensive study and hard work.
Ray didn’t blame them for that mindset, but he was glad it was in his past. There was little in the way of material goods he longed for, these days. He owned books and music, good Scotch, and a home with plenty of space to move around in. His desires now were, he was happy to admit, more cerebral—even, if he could be so bold, spiritual. He wanted to help others; in particular, he wanted to help the victims of violent crimes, or their survivors, reach some kind of peace with what had happened to them. Their lives could never be put right, but they shouldn’t have to carry difficult questions with them for all their days. Who did this? Why? To what end? With the exception of those who knowingly embraced a violent lifestyle, most crime victims were plagued by these concerns, as they sought to make sense of an inherently senseless act.
Ray’s life—this stage of it, anyway—was dedicated to answering those questions, and to helping ensure that the people who had committed violence against others didn’t get the chance to keep doing so.
He had been part of that medical establishment for years. More recently, he had seen it from the other side, as a victim and a patient. A psychopath named Nate Haskell had, in spite of Ray’s experience and precautions, played him and attacked him, and Ray had not only lost a kidney but had, in a very real way, lost his innocence. He understood now, in a more immediate and visceral manner than ever before, the one-two body blow of powerlessness and violation that crime victims knew. He was gripped by grief and rage that finally gave way to a grudging acceptance of his new status in life: victim, temporarily disabled, weakened, and vulnerable.
Pulling into the medical park’s lot, a momentary wave of nausea gripped him. He pushed it aside, knowing it was nothing more than a reaction to the environment, reminding him of his injuries, of seemingly endless physical therapy sessions, of the pitying looks people tossed him when they thought he couldn’t see, as he hobbled with his cane from place to place.
When he passed through the glass front doors of the Indigo Valley Blood Center, a young woman eyed him from the far side of a window. She sat behind a counter, and as he neared, she slid the window aside. “Can I help you?” she asked. “Do you have an appointment?”
He let bemusement win out over the flash of misplaced anger that rose in him first. “I’m not a patient,” he said, pulling back his blazer to reveal the badge holder hanging in his inside pocket. “I’m with the Crime Lab.”
Her eyes saucered. They were a striking shade of blue, edging toward violet. “Has there been a crime?”
“Not here,” he said. “But I am here on official business. I need to find out who the recipient of a marrow donation was.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s a privacy issue,” she said. “We can’t reveal that.”
“I understand the privacy concerns, believe me. I’m a physician, and I volunteer at a clinic here in town. I’m completely sympathetic. But we have a situation here that trumps privacy. The recipient’s life might be in danger . . . or it might be too late altogether.”
“I . . . I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“Who can? Please, I don’t have time for a lot of bureaucratic runaround. Just send me straight to the top.”
“Belinda Jones is our managing director,” she said. “I’m not sure she’s still on the premises, though.”
“Please check for me.”
She nodded and reached for her phone at the same moment. She touched a couple of keys, waited, caught Ray’s gaze. “She’s not answering,” she whispered. Then, “Oh, hi Belinda. There’s a police detective up here at the front. He’d like to speak with you. Okay, thanks.” She hung up the phone and met Ray’s eyes again. “She’ll be right up.”
He thanked her, without bothering to correct her misidentification of his job title. Most people, civilians, didn’t understand the difference. Any police officer in a uniform was a cop, and any cop in street clothes was a detective, even if he wasn’t a cop at all, but a scientist.
The receptionist pointed toward a bank of empty chairs. “You can have a seat there,” she said.
“I’m fine,” Ray said. Standing still for a long time was painful. But so was sitting and then standing again. Or lying down. Pain was a constant companion. At the moment, he thought standing was easiest, if it wouldn’t be too long. And if it was, he would make the woman call Belinda Jones again.
In just a minute or so, he heard the clip-clop footsteps of a woman in heels hurrying down the tile-floored hallway. A trim woman in a conservative gray dress came around a corner. He watched her fix a smile on her face. Her hair was black with a few strands of silver showing, and her skin was smooth and pale.
“I’m Belinda Jones,” she said as she neared him.
He let her see the badge, then allowed the jacket to close as he switched his cane to his left hand and offered his right. “Dr. Ray Langston,” he said. “I’m with the Las Vegas Police Department Crime Lab.”
“Would you like to come to my office?”
“That would be fine, thank you.”
“Right this way.” She led him back the way she had come, her pace slower, letting him keep up. People in the medical professions got used to being around the infirm. She didn’t make small talk; not a word passed between them until they were inside her office with the door closed. Instead of sitting, she leaned against a corner of her desk, gestured toward a straight-backed leather chair. “Please.”
“Thank you,” Ray said. His gratitude was genuine; he was more than ready to avail himself of the opportunity.
“What is it I can do for you, Dr. Langston?”
“I need information. I’m a medical doctor, I understand all about patient privacy, but I also know the law. Someone’s life is at risk, and if I have to get a court order, I will.”
“Let’s see if we can avoid that,” she said. She still wore the same smile she had composed in the hallway, and it had all the authenticity of a horsehair wig.
“That would be my preference, as well. Here’s the story. A severed hand was found here in the city, and when we tested the bone marrow for DNA—the tissue was too severely compromised—we came up with a match to a man named Carter Hawkins. Mr. Hawkins has both of the hands he was born with; however, Mr. Hawkins has also been a bone marrow donor, through your facility.”
Belinda Jones blinked three times. “I’m not sure I’m following you.”
“Under certain circumstances—to which, in this case, I think we have to stipulate, barring other information—donated bone marrow can completely replace native marrow. The DNA of the recipient matches that of the donor, as long as that DNA is derived from marrow. Which, in this case, it was. In order to discover who the hand belongs to, and to find out if its rightful owner is alive or dead or perhaps in serious need of medical attention, we need to know who received Mr. Hawkins’s donated marrow.”
She was, he noted, a very composed woman. Medical administrators tended not to be emotional types, he had found. They had to stay calm in times of crisis, had to keep cool heads. Ms. Jones’s was positively arctic. “I understand.”
“So, will you help me? Or do I have to come back with a court order, and sheriff’s officers to help me enforce it? It would be unfortunate to have to disrupt your operations for even a day or two, much less weeks, but if we had to search through every file . . .” She came off as so unflappable that he was playing it tough, trying to flap her anyway.
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” she said. She didn’t appear the least bit flapped, but she shifted off the corner of the desk and walked around it, sat in her chair, and opened a laptop computer. “The donor’s name was Hawkins?”
Ray spelled it for her, and gave her the address and date of birth. Her fingers tap-danced on the keyboard. “The patient’s name is Ruben Solis.”
“Can you brief me on his circumstances? It might help to find him.”
She wrote something down on a sheet of paper, tore it from her pad, and slid it across the desk toward Ray. “There’s his address and phone number. He was diagnosed with aplastic anemia. His body stopped producing new red blood cells, because of some damage—”
“Damage to the bone marrow, I know. So his native marrow was depleted—”
Her turn to interrupt, and she seemed glad to do it. “With radiation, in his case.”
“And then the donated marrow introduced. It set up housekeeping and generated new blood cells, new stem cells, reproducing itself.”
“And so his marrow’s DNA would match that of Mr. Hawkins. Very strange, but I guess it makes sense.”
“It’s an extremely rare occurrence, but not unheard of.”
“Well, there’s Mr. Solis’s contact information. I hope you can find him, and give him back his hand.”
“I’m afraid it’s a bit worse for wear,” Ray said. “But I would like to know how he lost it, and what his present condition is.”
“I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell him how you found him. We perform an essential function here, Dr. Langston. Getting people to donate blood is a walk in the park compared to marrow donations. People are terrified of the whole idea. They imagine that we’re going to have to carve into their bones and scoop it out with spoons, or something. Patient privacy is something that I take very seriously, but I know you could prevail in court if you tried. I gave in, but not happily.”
“Noted,” Ray said. “Thank you for your cooperation.”
“I’ve never met Mr. Solis, but I hope you find him well.”
“As do I, believe me. As do I.”
Ruben Solis’s home was between Indigo Valley Blood and the crime lab, so Ray swung by on his way back. The neighborhood was the polar opposite of the medical park with its sleek, modern buildings and lots full of new, pricey cars. Approaching Solis’s street, Ray covered block after block of run-down homes, neglected yards, corner liquor stores with barred windows and graffiti-stained walls. The few pedestrians eyed him as he passed, their skin mostly brown, hair mostly black, expressions ranging from curious to hostile. This was the Las Vegas the tourists never saw, the neighborhood where hotel maids and dishwashers and landscapers went when their shifts ended.
Ray parked in front of a small house covered in cracked brown stucco, falling somewhere in the architectural range between Santa Fe style and cardboard box. The front yard was poured concrete, painted green. It made a certain sense in a desert climate, but there were more elegant ways to go about it. He crossed the concrete, pulled open a flyspecked screen, and rapped on the door. He could see light through a peephole, and then it went dark.
“What do you want?” a female’s voice asked from the other side.
“I’m with the police department’s Crime Lab,” Ray said. “I’m looking for Ruben Solis.”
“I don’t know no one like that.”
Ray held his badge to the peephole. “Please, ma’am, this would be easier if you could open up. If you want, I can give you the lab’s phone number so you can call and make sure I am who I say.”
She was quiet for a moment, but then the door opened a few inches, to the length of the security chain. A pretty face appeared in the gap, a mane of thick black hair, brown eyes with laugh lines at the corners. “What?” she asked.
“Doesn’t Ruben Solis live here?”
“I told you, no.”
“What’s your name?”
“Lucia.”
“Lucia what?”
“Lucia Navarre.”
“Ms. Navarre, I’m Dr. Langston. I’m not a cop, I’m a scientist.” He held up the cane, as if to demonstrate his harmlessness. “It’s very important that I find Mr. Solis. He’s not in any trouble, but he might be in some kind of danger.”
Lucia closed the door again. Ray heard her release the chain, and then she opened it. She was short, on the heavy side for a city that idealized tall, thin, and leggy, but with hints of a lush figure beneath a baggy Las Vegas Chiefs jersey and black jeans. She was probably in her twenties, but had the kind of skin that could stay youthful well into her forties. She kept her gaze aimed somewhere toward the ground behind Ray. “I told you already twice, I don’t know him.”
“Do you live here alone, ma’am?”
“Since my husband went away, yes.”
CSIs were trained to notice things that others might miss. In this instance, Ray noticed that although she had willingly opened the door, she clutched it in a death grip so tight that her knuckles were blanched. Her weight was on her left leg, and the heel of her right foot was tapping fast enough to power the city, should Hoover Dam fail. She was nervous. There were plenty of reasons for a Latina to be anxious in the presence of law enforcement, but the most common involved immigration status, which was no concern of Ray’s.
“I really need to find Mr. Solis,” he said again. “I’m not here to make trouble for you or anyone else.”
She met his gaze at last, giving him an exasperated look. He knew why—because he wasn’t buying her story. Maybe it was the truth. But this address was the only thing Ray had to go on. And Lucia was so nervous he couldn’t help thinking she was hiding something. Maybe Solis was the husband who had moved out.
The place was furnished inexpensively, with little in the way of decoration. But on shelves in the living room there were dozens of strange little constructions, wooden boxes with scenes inside them. There were street scenes and desert scenes, interiors and out, all the people fabricated with what looked like found objects—pieces of hardware, nails and bolts and bits of shredded screen, scraps of wood, melted plastic, chunks of tire. “Those are interesting,” he said. “Did you make them?”
“What was your husband’s name?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Enrique.”
Ray decided to play a hunch. She wasn’t being honest with him, he could tell that much. If he tried to push too hard, she would just clam up. She was certainly within her rights to do so. He didn’t want that to happen, and if he had to employ a little subterfuge of his own to find Solis, he would do so. “I’m sorry to be a bother, Ms. Navarre. Since I was injured . . . I wonder if I could use your restroom.” As if thinking better of it, he turned away. “No, I’m sorry, that’s so rude—”
“It’s fine,” she interrupted. “Go ahead.”
“If you’re sure.”
“Yes, of course.” She stepped back from the door and indicated a dark doorway down the hall. “It’s just there.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so much.”
He moved past her, went into the bathroom and turned on the light. Inside, he ran water at a trickle for a few moments, while he scanned the medicine cabinet to see if Ruben’s name appeared on any prescription drugs. It didn’t, but his gaze landed on a hairbrush, thick with black hair. Some strands were long and lustrous, like Lucia’s, but others were short and coarse. He took the piece of paper on which Ruben’s name and address were written from his pocket, put the hairs in the middle, and folded up the lower one-third of the sheet. He folded the upper third over that, then repeated the process with the sides. When he was finished, he tucked one end into the other. The result was called a druggist fold, and it was accepted in the forensic science field as a good way to secure small evidence samples, without fear that adhesives from tape or glue might contaminate them.
He flushed the toilet, washed his hands, plucked a few more stray long hairs from the brush and emerged from the bathroom. “Ms. Navarre, I wonder if I might take a few hairs from your brush?” he asked, displaying the ones in his hand. “Just to run a DNA test, to make sure that I can exclude you.”
“Exclude me from what?”
“Well, the truth is we’re not positive that Ruben Solis is who we’re looking for.” Which was true, as far as it went—Ray had thought he was looking for Carter Hawkins at first. Until he found Solis, he wouldn’t know for certain.
“So you might be looking for a woman?”
“It’s hard to say. I don’t think so. But if I can test these then I’ll know for sure it’s not you.”
“Well . . .”
“I promise you, I’m not looking to create any problems for you. I don’t know what your citizenship status is, and I’m not going to ask. I don’t know if you are employed, or where. All I want is to answer some questions about the whereabouts and condition of Mr. Solis—or whoever—and leave you in peace.”
“Okay, I guess,” Lucia said.
“Thank you.” He tucked the hairs into his shirt pocket, patted it. Entirely useless, for evidentiary purposes. But she had granted permission to remove hairs from the house, and he was doing so.
The long hairs, he was pretty sure, were hers. The shorter ones, almost certainly not. If Ruben Solis’s DNA—his own DNA, not the borrowed stuff—was in the system, then he could find out if they belonged to him. And if they did, Ray would be making a return visit to Lucia Navarre’s house, sometime very soon.