Diagnosis Murder: The Death Merchant (11 page)

Besides, he hated it when Amanda lectured him. Especially when she was right

Jesse admired and respected the bright, bubbly, African-American woman. She was a brilliant pathologist, a respected medical examiner, and an attentive single mother of a five-year-old boy, a feat she pulled off by being extraordinarily organized, practical, and focused. It was how she managed her life so efficiently and, in Jesse's opinion, how she tried to manage everyone else's.

"People like a breakfast that sticks to their ribs," Jesse said, hoping it didn't come out as defensive whining and certain that it did.

"And their waistlines and their butts," Amanda said, barely stifling a smile. "Look at these people. It's sticking all over them."

"You know what you are?" Jesse wagged a finger at her. "A food prude."

"A what?"

"A food prude," Jesse said. "If people don't eat like you, if they don't graze on weeds all day and swallow handfuls of vitamins like peanuts, they're barbarians or fatsoes."

Amanda thought about it for a moment. "You swallow peanuts by the handful? No wonder you think you're serving a balanced breakfast here."

Jesse groaned in frustration and disappeared into the kitchen. Amanda grinned to herself and finished her coffee just as Mark and Steve came in, all tan and rested from their vacation.

Well, they were tan, anyway, Amanda thought. They didn't look very rested.

"Welcome back," Amanda said, as they slid onto stools on either side of her.

"Have you been giving Jesse hell?" Steve asked.

"I've been doing my part," Amanda said. "But I guess I can ease up a little now that you're back. How was the trip?"

"It was great for a while," Steve said.

"Especially toward the end," Mark said.

Steve snorted derisively. "Speak for yourself."

"What happened?" Amanda asked.

"He found a murder to investigate," Steve said.

"Why am I not surprised?" Amanda said. "What did he do, scan the paper each day looking for homicides he could intrude on? How many crime scenes did he show up at un invited?"

"Why are you talking about me like I'm not here?" Mark said. "It's not like I go looking for murders to get involved in."

Steve and Amanda both turned and looked at him. Mark shifted self-consciously on his stool.

"Well, not this time I didn't," Mark said, motioning to Steve. "You could back me up on this."

"I could," Steve said, making no effort to do so.

Jesse emerged from the kitchen and broke out in a huge smile when he saw Steve and Mark at the counter. "Hey, how was the vacation?"

"It was murder," Steve said. "As usual."

Amanda could see Jesse was confused. "Mark got involved in a homicide investigation."

Jesse gave Mark a chastising look. "On your vacation? You just can't help yourself, can you? What were you thinking?"

Amanda held out her hand, palm open, to Jesse, who sighed, reached into his pocket, and handed her a crumpled $20 bill.

"You had a bet?" Mark asked, astonished.

She shrugged. "It was a sucker bet." Amanda smiled at Jesse. "And I found a sucker."

Jesse glared at Steve. "Why couldn't you control him? He's your father."

"To be fair," Steve said. "It wasn't entirely his fault. The guy was attacked by a shark right in front of us."

Jesse looked incredulously at Mark. "You were investigating a shark for murder?"

"It was a bit more complicated than that," Mark said.

"It already sounds complicated," Amanda said.

While Steve went back into the kitchen to get their breakfast order going, Mark began filling Amanda and Jesse in on their investigation into Danny Royal's murder and the dead ends they ran into so far. By the time his story was done, Mark and Steve had finished their breakfast and were sipping their coffee.

"Which forensic anthropologist did you give the photos and measurements of Danny's face to?" Amanda asked.

"Claire Rossiter," Mark replied.

"She's the best," Amanda said. "If it's okay with you, I'll give Dr. Aki a call in Kauai, and see if he'll fax me his report. I'd like to work with Claire on this."

"I'd appreciate it," Mark said.

"Wait a minute," Steve said, pushing his empty coffee cup aside. "Now you're getting into this, too?"

Amanda frowned. "I'm just assisting."

"No one asked you to," Steve said, then glared at his father. "Or you either. It's not our case, it's a Kauai Police investigation, and they're handling it."

"What difference does it make to you if Amanda and Mark want to volunteer their time and expertise?" Jesse asked.

"Because it inevitably means I'm going to get dragged into it, too," Steve said. "I don't mind that if it's an LAPD case. Well, I do mind, but I've learned to live with it. This is actually meddling. You have no legitimate reason to be involved."

"Sgt. Kealoha doesn't have a lot of resources available to him," Mark said. "I don't think he'll care if we lend him some of ours."

"Ah ha!" Steve slapped the table. "That's exactly what I'm talking about. What resources did you have in mind?"

Mark tapped his head with an index finger and smiled. "Just what I was born with."

Steve narrowed his eyes accusingly. "What about Amanda? You've already got her going over the autopsy reports from Kauai and assisting the forensic anthropologist in a facial reconstruction."

"I volunteered," she said. "Remember?"

"Don't you see?" Steve said to her. "That's how it starts. Pretty soon you're devoting all your waking hours, and the hours you're not supposed to be awake, to chasing down his hunches. It's insidious."

"And it's fun," Jesse said, turning to Mark. "What can I do?"

Jesse was always eager to help, gladly volunteering what little free time he had between his ER residency and co-owning a restaurant, which didn't make his girlfriend, Susan, too happy, though he could usually talk her into helping Mark, too.

"A fresh cup of coffee would be nice," Mark said, sliding his cup toward him. "I'm afraid for now there isn't much else you can do. The case is at a standstill."

Mark glanced at Steve, who was quietly fuming. He understood Steve's reluctance to spend his Hawaii vacation investigating a murder, but his son had gone along with it anyway. But now that they were back home, Mark was surprised by Steve's unusually heated opposition.

Many years ago, when Steve first became a detective, he hated it when his father got involved in his cases. It embarrassed Steve to have his dad show up uninvited at crime scenes, offering unsolicited advice and looking over his shoulder. But his son had come to appreciate and rely on Mark's help, ignoring the jeers from fellow cops, and his case clearance rate soared. Over time, Mark and Steve developed a smooth and effective investigative rapport that they both enjoyed.

Or so Mark thought. What had changed?

CHAPTER TWELVE

For the next week, it was business as usual for Dr. Mark Sloan. He went into Community General Hospital each day, treated his patients, consulted with other physicians on their patients, attended administrative meetings, and ate his lunches in the cafeteria. When he came home, he read through medical journals, did crossword puzzles, watched CNN, and tried each night, without success, to make a different Danny Royal recipe. He became convinced that Danny Royal, among his other as-yet-unknown crimes, purposely left key ingredients out of his recipes.

All week, Mark resisted the urge to call Ben Kealoha or Claire Rossiter, the forensic anthropologist, to see how their work was going. He did, however, look about a thousand times at the souvenir recipe card on which he'd replicated Danny's handwritten note: Re: Ideal Oven, Ask Jim Lowe. A loose, trendy cook.

There were three Jim Lowes in the state of Hawaii and he'd called all three, only to find that Sgt. Kealoha had as well. None of them worked in the kitchen appliance business, nor were they chefs, nor had they ever met Danny Royal. The Jim Lowes also wondered why a doctor from Los Angeles was calling and why they should answer any of his questions.

Mark got that reaction a lot over the years. He was used to it.

So, antsy and anxious, Mark pestered Steve about the homicides he was working on. Unfortunately, the cases weren't very perplexing, nor were the guilty parties hard to spot. Husbands killing wives. Gang members killing rivals. Stalkers killing the objects of their obsessions.

For Steve, it came down to paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork, and Mark couldn't help him with that.

After just a week back, Steve was ready for another vacation. In a completely different sense, so was Mark. He needed something to challenge his mind, and his work at Community General wasn't enough.

Finally, he woke up early one morning to find an e-mail from Claire Rossiter waiting for him, with the digital files of Danny Royal's facial reconstruction attached. He down loaded them, and a face slowly appeared on his computer screen.

The face staring back at Mark on his computer monitor looked nothing like the Danny Royal he'd met. This man had a fuller, fleshier, more lived-in face, which made sense, since it approximated the one he'd actually been born with. Even though it was a computer-generated image, this face had imperfections rather than the airbrushed smoothness of a male model on a magazine cover,

Mark felt strangely disappointed. He'd expected to see something revealing in the face, something that betrayed Danny Royal's past or true character. Instead, the face was just that: another face. It conveyed neither intelligence nor malice nor anything else. Would a real picture, as opposed to a computer-generated image, have been more revealing? Would he have seen the qualities he'd been hoping for? He doubted it.

He forwarded the picture to FBI Special Agent Ron Wagner, an old friend at the Bureau he'd worked with on the Pac Atlantic Flight 224 investigation, and asked him to run the photo through their databases. He gave Steve a copy when he came up to breakfast and asked him to see if Danny's description matched any open cases at the LAPD.

"You could just forward this photo to Ben Kealoha," Steve said. "He could put it out on the wires himself."

"I've got contacts at the FBI he doesn't have," Mark said. "They'll get to it quicker if it comes through me rather than Ben."

"I'm sure Ron would have pushed it through as fast for a friend of yours as he would for you," Steve said. "Be honest, Dad, you just want to be involved."

"Okay, I confess, I want to solve this myself," Mark said. "I spent time with the victim. I saw his murder. I examined his corpse. I can't leave it at that. It feels personal to me now."

"It's not because you met Danny or saw his murder," Steve said. "It's because you figured out the shark attack trick. At that moment, in your mind it became a cat-and-mouse game between you and the killer, and you can't walk away from the playing field."

"You're right," Mark conceded. "And I won't stop until I catch him."

"Dad, there's no telling where this investigation will take you," Steve said. "Danny Royal could have come from any where. Unless it turns out to be an LAPD case, I'm not going to be able to back you up. It's not like I can call in any vacation days—I just used them up."

"I understand," Mark said.

"I'm not sure you do," Steve said. "You're chasing a professional killer. You get too close, he'll take you out of the game."

"It's not the first time I've faced that risk," Mark said.

"But it may be the first time you do it alone," Steve said. "If it comes to that, if it looks like you're going to be out there without me to watch your back, walk away from it. Don't die for this. I'd never forgive myself."

Now it all became clear to Mark. This was the reason Steve was so opposed to him continuing to investigate the case. Steve was worried he wouldn't be able to protect his father from harm.

Mark surprised Steve by giving him a hug. The Sloans weren't a very affectionate family, despite their devotion to each other. So whenever they touched, it came as a surprise and was unexpectedly emotional.

"Now you know how I feel every time you go to work," Mark said.

"There's a big difference, Dad," Steve said. "I've got a badge and a gun."

"It doesn't make you bulletproof," Mark said. "I still worry."

Steve considered that for a moment, then said, "This is why I don't have kids."

How touching, Wyatt thought.

He sat on his bed in his room at the Santa Monica Holiday Inn, looking at the facial reconstruction on his laptop and listening to the Sloans' sickly sweet conversation.

He was pleased that Mark considered this a contest between the two of them. This was a lonely profession, and to have someone out there, a dedicated adversary, was a new and exciting change for Wyatt. He retained his essential anonymity, and yet was actively engaging another individual in a game.

It was a game that Mark Sloan couldn't possibly win, not with Wyatt's unfair advantage. Still, it was fun.

Wyatt had to admire Mark Sloan's resourcefulness. This forensic anthropologist he'd found was first-rate. The facial reconstruction was a remarkably accurate recreation of Danny Royal's original face. Mark was well on his way to discovering the truth about the dead man.

Wyatt was pleased, because now the bugs and tracking devices would really start paying off, making his difficult assignment so much easier. Already he'd learned about Jim Lowe, though he had no idea where Mark had found the name or what its significance might be.

Wyatt had spent days compiling lists of Jim Lowes in every state in the nation. There were hundreds, and he was doing full background checks on each of them. It was tedious research, hours spent hunched over his laptop, but it was necessary. The key was not to let the tedium dull his senses, to make him blind to the revealing fact when it finally showed itself amid all that irrelevant data.

The fact hadn't emerged yet, but Wyatt was relentless. He'd find it.

If Jim Lowe was one of the others, then Wyatt had to find the man before Mark Sloan did.

And then Jim Lowe would have to die.