Blood Lies (4 page)

Her throat bobbed. “Yes, I do.”

“It’s not what you think. When I was your age, I took my brother to a party. I gave him drugs. Encouraged him to take them.”

“What happened?” Isabelle choked out.

On the brink of tears myself, I looked away from the girls. “Once he got that first taste, Aaron was never the same. It ruined his life….”

Isabelle threw her arms around her sister’s neck, sending Lara into another paroxysm of coughs. When Isabelle looked up, tears streamed down her cheeks, but her jaw was clenched and her eyes burned with determination. “That’s not going to happen to Lara. I swear it!”

I forced a smile. “I believe it.”

I quickly said my good-byes and then headed for the elevator.

Stepping out, I almost slammed into my colleague and close friend, Dr. Alex Lindquist. At barely five feet, Alex was more than a head shorter than me, though her diminutive size was no reflection of her fiery personality. Most of the staff loved her. The few who crossed her inevitably regretted it.

Her hair pinned back, Alex wore a white lab coat draped over blue scrubs. I tried to ignore the impact of those expressive brown eyes, luscious lips, and high Slavic cheeks but failed as usual, and her proximity brought the expected stirrings.

“Ben!” she practically shrieked. “You look awful!”

I shrugged. “I told the lady not to cut my bangs so short.”

She grabbed me by the arm. “Coffee!” she commanded.

We sat in the corner of the hospital’s nearly deserted cafeteria with large cups of coffee in front of us. “Was your night shift that bad?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Remember Emily Kenmore?”

“Sure.” Her eyes narrowed, and I wondered if I spotted a flicker of jealousy. “The only serious ex I know of.”

“She was killed last night.”

Alex slammed down her cup on the table. “No!”

“Someone carved her up, Alex.”

Alex sat still, cradling the cup that looked massive in her small hand while I recounted what I’d seen at the crime scene.

“God, Ben, I am so sorry.” She reached over and squeezed my hand just once before withdrawing.

I nodded. “We hadn’t been together for a long time.”

“Doesn’t matter. To see that happen to someone you loved…”

We stared at our coffees in silence for a few moments. “I don’t get it, Ben. Why would the cops drag you down there?”

“To ID her, I suppose.”

She shook her head. “Don’t buy that for a second. That falls to the family. Besides, it’s done in the morgue when they’re tidied up. Not smack dab in the middle of the bloodshed.”

“Alex, I know the Homicide detectives involved. Helen Riddell and Rick Sutcliffe worked Aaron’s case. I’ve consulted for them on a number of poisonings and overdose deaths. I consider Helen a friend.”

Alex kept shaking her head. “Even more reason not to put you through that.”

“Plus, they wanted me to help identify the John Doe.”

“Did you?”

I paused. “No.”

“But you knew him?”

I’d forgotten how uncanny Alex’s intuition was. “I’d met him once, briefly. With Emily.”

Alex tilted her head expecting more, but I wasn’t forthcoming. “What now?” she asked.

“They investigate.” I sighed. “I should probably call Emily’s parents. God, she put them through a lot. Now this…”

“Give it a few days, okay?” she said softly. “It’s only fair to them. And you.”

“Alex, I lied to the detectives.”

She grimaced. “About?”

“I didn’t tell them Emily and I were engaged.”

Alex bit her lip. “I had no idea.”

“No one did,” I said. “We were going to elope. Only Aaron knew. And then, when it fell apart, we never told anyone else.”

Alex squeezed my hand a second time. When she pulled away, I felt the coolness of her wedding band slide over the back of my hand. “You okay?”

I tilted my hand side to side in a so-so gesture.

Her face lit up in a radiant smile. “Why don’t you let me take you out for dinner tomorrow?”

“What about Marcus?”

“Business. He’s back east again for a week.”

“And Talie?”

“Dad can watch her.”

“Very tempting…” Her understanding face lifted a bit of the load off my mind. But reason prevailed over emotion. “I’m not sure dinner is such a good idea,” I said, remembering the last fateful time we had gone out for dinner and drinks, a year earlier at a conference in San Francisco, and nearly wound up in bed together.

She took a final sip of her coffee and then put the empty cup down. “Good friends go out for dinner, you know.”

“I know.”

She smiled. “There’s no harm in a phone call, though, right?”

“None.”

She jabbed a finger at me. “You call me, Benjamin Dafoe. Day or night! Understand?”

I nodded. “Thanks, Alex.”

“I better get back to the pit.” She pointed in the direction of the ER as she rose to her feet. She crossed over to my side of the table and gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “Day or night,” she repeated.

She made it three steps from the table before she stopped and turned back. “Why?”

I frowned. “Why what?”

Her eyes bored into mine. “Why was Emily carved up?”

I broke off our eye contact and spoke to the table. “I don’t know, but something tells me it has to do with what happened to Aaron.”

At first, I incorporated the ringing phone into my dream. But the second set of rings dragged me back into consciousness. I stared bleary-eyed at the clock radio whose fat red numbers read 5:35
A.M.

I groped for the phone. “Hello,” I muttered.

Nothing.

I’d barely crammed the receiver back into the base when it rang again. I picked it up. “Yes?”

Another pause, then “Benjamin?” spoken in a whisper.

“Who is this?” I asked, feeling a sudden cool rush.

“I was there.”

My skin crawled. “What are you talking about?”

“The fight. I saw it.”

My heart rate sped up. “What fight?”

“The fight, Benjamin,” the whisperer repeated. “You and Emily. And J.D. Let’s not forget J.D.”

I sat up in my bed. “J.D.?”

There was a soft chortle on the line. “It’s going to work out, Benjamin.”

“Listen!” My voice rose, in spite of myself. “You’re not making any sense.”

“I think we both know that I am.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“A friend.”

“Friend,” I growled, “You’re getting me confused with someone else!”

Another laugh. “Not if you’re the Dr. Benjamin Dafoe who I saw fighting with Emily and J.D. before they died. The one who—”

I clicked the
END
button and threw the cordless receiver across the room. When it rang again, I just stared at it. My hands trembled—part fear, part fury.

A good minute after it stopped ringing, I climbed out of bed and picked up the receiver. I scrolled through the call display with a still-shaky thumb. The readout read:
CANADA.

Canada
?
And how the hell did he find my number
? Like most physicians’, my home number was unlisted.

Confused and edgy, I changed into shorts and a drip-dry shirt. Grabbing my shoes, I headed out of the house through the basement to the attached garage. I unlocked the racing bike, which had cost almost as much as my car, and carefully pulled it off the ceiling rack. I saddled it up and locked my feet into the pedals.

I needed to go very fast this morning.

I rode out past Lake Washington, then turned back and headed for the airport. Unmoved by the striking view of the snow-capped Mt. Rainier jutting into the blue morning sky, I raced through downtown Seattle’s quiet dawn. I screamed past my usual turn-back point and just kept cycling. Twenty-five miles later, and my agitation finally calmed. I turned around and headed home at a more leisurely pace.

Riding home, Aaron’s assessment of my cycling came back to me. Three years after he spoke the words, I could still hear them.

Out in front of his townhouse in the trendy and pricey Queen Anne neighborhood, I straddled my bike while Aaron stood beside me swaying slightly on the pavement, as if carried by the light spring breeze. The pupils in his faraway eyes were constricted, his voice slurred.

“What’s going on, Aaron?”

“Not much,” he said. “Taking in the breeze. Chatting with my twin bro…”

“You’re high.”

Aaron shrugged and almost stumbled.

I shook my head. “Seems like you’re always high.”

Aaron didn’t respond.

“This what you want for your future?”

“It will do for now.”

“Listen to me, Aaron. You need help.”

At first, I didn’t think he’d heard me, but after a few moments, he said, “I’ve had help. Doesn’t work.”

“I know a new treatment facility. Experimental, but promising. The guy who runs it is a friend—”

Eyes glazed, he stared beyond me. “Save your breath, Ben.”

I slammed my front tire in frustration. “Aaron, you’re a fucking addict!”

With that, he snapped into focus. He pointed a finger at me. “Of course I am! Don’t you get it, twin? It’s genetic. In our blood. Remember Dad and the booze?” His finger shook. “We got no choice. We’re both addicts.”

“Oh? And what’s my addiction?”

His finger indicated my riding getup and then settled on my bike. “You’re sitting on it. That bike of yours is your bottle, bro. Your pipe and needle, too….”

I had little doubt Aaron was right. But I also knew that as stupid and reckless as I might be on the bike, it was less risky than
his
alternative. Besides, unlike the drugs, cycling usually cleared my head. I did my best thinking on the bike. Not today, though. As I pulled back into my driveway, I hadn’t sorted out any of this mess.

I stepped into my living room to the sound of the ringing phone. I was relieved to see that this time the call display offered a local name:
SEATTLE POLICE.

Half an hour later, I arrived in Helen’s office. Her royal blue blouse was a relatively subdued choice for her. I took a seat across from Helen and beside Rick Sutcliffe, who sported another thousand-dollar trendy jacket-pant ensemble. As usual, I sensed a degree of contempt in his smiley welcome.

“Get some sleep?” Helen gave me the once-over and grinned, as if to suggest I didn’t look quite as shitty as yesterday.

I nodded. “Couple hours.”

“We were at Emily’s autopsy this morning,” Helen said.

“And?”

“No big
Quincy
-like surprises, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

I swallowed. “Any evidence of sexual assault?”

“None.”

I nodded my relief. “I was thinking, there was so much blood in her bedroom…”

“Which happens from time to time at double homicides,” Rick said.

I ignored him. “You need a beating heart to spray blood like that. Emily must have been alive for a while.”

Helen leaned back heavily in her chair. “Yeah.”

“And judging from the surface area covered,” I said, “she must have been moving around after she was already stabbed but before the blow to her neck.”

“Your point?” Helen asked.

I offered a disclaimer. “Maybe Emily just struggled hard. I don’t know. But it seems to me someone took his sweet time. You ever heard that expression ‘death by a thousand cuts’?”

Rick and Helen shared a glance, possibly even impressed. “It looks that way on autopsy,” Helen said. “Whoever was responsible wanted her to bleed. Pathologist figures the cut to the neck was the final blow. She had little left to give by that point.”

“All that blood…” I tasted the acid in the back of my mouth. “Someone wanted her to suffer.”

Helen nodded slightly.

“Anything else on autopsy?”

“The tox screens are still pending. But under the second victim’s fingernails, they found traces of Methylen…” Helen’s voice trailed off and she threw up her hands in defeat. She laughed. “I don’t even know why I tried. I didn’t stand a chance of coughing out that hairball.”

“Methylene dioxymethamphetamine?” I said.

Helen nodded and chuckled. “You make it sound like butter.”

I sighed. “Easier to just call it Ecstasy, like the users do.”

Rick eyed me with a grin that had acquired a fingernails-on-chalkboard quality for me. “My guess is that Emily wasn’t quite as clean as she made out to you.”

Prudently, I just turned back to Helen. “What else about the John Doe?”

“More like Jason Doe,” she said. “Or more precisely, Jason DiAngelo from Redmond. Twenty-nine years old. Went by ‘J.D.’”

J.D.!
I fought off a shudder at the memory of the name being whispered by the predawn caller. “What do you know about him?”

“For starters, he wasn’t a complete stranger to the King County criminal justice system.” Helen patted around her desk until she found a piece of paper, a copy of his criminal record. “A bunch of charges for theft, assault, and small-time drug trafficking. J.D. did about three years in total. Then, two years ago, he was arrested for narcotics possession. A kilo of coke in his trunk.”

“And?”

“J.D. switched attorneys. Michael Prince.” She waited for a sign of recognition but I shook my head; the name meant nothing to me. “Of Pratt, Prince, and Higney. Known affectionately around these parts as the Prince of Darkness.” Still didn’t ring any bells for me. “Anyway, Prince convinced the judge to rule the search of J.D.’s car illegal. For all I know, Prince got the Seattle P.D. to pay for the cleaning and detailing on poor old J.D.’s violated vehicle.”

Rick grunted a chuckle. “Curious how a small-time dealer from the bottom of the Public Defender’s barrel rose to a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer in a few short years.”

“Maybe J.D. found a better employer?” I offered.

Rick nodded, but then sighed as if it pained him to agree with me. “Maybe the kind of employer with a brutal termination policy.”

“Even the Prince of Darkness can’t get poor old J.D. out of this scrape.” Helen stretched her long arms out wide and yawned. “Autopsy showed that J.D. died from the same knife used on Emily Kenmore.”

“But not quite the same M.O.,” I pointed out.

Rick shot me another unreadable glance, while Helen nodded. “J.D. didn’t have a single defensive wound,” she said.

“He never saw the knife coming,” I said.

“More than that,” Rick said. “He let the perp get very close without defending himself. No question, he trusted his killer.”

Helen’s eyes sparkled playfully. “Which loses him IQ points on my scorecard.”

“Maybe J.D. was at the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said. “Like the guy with O.J.’s wife?”

Rick folded his arms across his chest. “Or maybe he played an active role in the torture of Emily Kenmore, never realizing he was going to be the encore victim.”

“Jesus…,” I muttered.

Helen cleared papers off her desk and looked at me with uncharacteristic solemnity. “From the lack of forced entry right down to the M.O., all evidence suggests Emily Kenmore knew her killer.” She paused. “Ben, we’re hoping you can help us navigate her circle of friends.”

My stomach tightened. “Long time since I ran with that crowd, if I ever did. But I’ll do what I can.”

“Thanks.” Helen lifted a photo off her desk and passed it to me. “We did get one unexpected break at the crime scene.”

Expecting another snapshot of Emily, I hesitated in taking it. I knew it would only elicit another wave of unwanted memories. But Emily wasn’t in the photograph. No one was. Confused, I stared at a color photo of Emily’s gruesome bedroom wall. One of the arcs of blood was marked with a black arrow and a caption that read
AB
-.

I shrugged at Helen, though I already had an inkling of what it meant.

Rick was quick to explain. “Emily’s blood type was O-positive. And most all of the blood at the scene was of that type.” He tapped the photo in my hand over the arrow. “But this streak was AB-negative.”

“And J.D.?”

Rick’s grin widened. “B-positive.”

“So this streak of blood came from the killer?” I said.

“Emily or J.D. might have got in one shot before the end,” Helen said. “Or just as likely, the killer accidentally nicked himself with his own blade.”

I said nothing.

AB-negative is the rarest of blood types, found in fewer than one in two hundred people.

It also happens to be mine.