Most Wanted (3 page)

“Silly.” Marcus reached on the console for the wraparound Maui Jims that he used for golf, and slipped them on his face. “Honey, he's not our donor.”

“He could be. I mean, it's possible.”

“No, it's not possible. It's out of the question. I can't even believe you're serious. They screen these donors.”

“I'm sure they do some, but how much? And what?” Christine thought about it. She had never asked anyone the question about what kind of screening they did for donors. She remembered reading some boilerplate on the site and wished she had paid more attention.

“These are reputable banks. We were referred to them by Dr. Davidow. It's not like some fly-by-night operation.”

“But still, it's not impossible. Someone committing a murder, or really any kind of crime, how do you screen for that?”

“Our donor must be a medical student by now. That guy they arrested wasn't a medical student.”

“Maybe he was, we didn't hear the story.” Christine thought that sounded improbable, even to herself, which made her feel a little better. They drove down the winding road toward the stone bridge. She checked her phone but there was still no reception. They'd be at Glastonbury Road in minutes. Sunlight dappled the asphalt from tall oaks lining the street, and the cornfield was a solid block of leafy green, fairly high for mid-June.

“Anyway, you only have one day left of school. Amazing, huh?”

“Yes, but I want to get this video up. Then I want you to look at it and see if I'm crazy.”

“You're crazy.” Marcus chuckled, his eyes hidden behind his sunglasses. He steered the car onto Shire Road, and Christine logged onto Safari, then navigated to the CNN site, tapping the heading of the news story on her iPhone screen, then enlarged it with her fingers to read it better.

“It says, ‘Zachary Jeffcoat, a Pennsylvania man, was arrested today—'”

“See, already. It's not our guy. Our guy's from Nevada.”

“Right, good, but let me read the story.” Christine tried to focus in the jostling car. “‘… was arrested today for the murder of Gail Robinbrecht, a thirty-one-year-old nurse from West Chester, PA. The murder is the third of three murders of nurses in Newport News, Virginia, and Bethesda, Maryland. Nurse Lynn McLeane, a pediatric nurse, was stabbed to death on January 12, and Susan Allen-Bogen, an operating-room nurse, was also stabbed to death using the same MO, on April 13—'”

Marcus clucked. “The guy kills nurses? What's the matter with people? Nurses are great.”

“Right, but it's weird that Donor 3319 was a medical student and the victims were nurses.”

“The guy they arrested isn't a medical student.”

“Right, I know.” Christine was confusing herself. Her face still burned, despite the air-conditioning. She returned her attention to the iPhone screen. “It says, ‘The murders gained national attention as the Nurse Murders.'”

“Does it say the killer is a medical student?”

“No, it doesn't.” Christine skimmed the last two lines of the story. “‘The police commissioner is gratified that the suspect is in custody and thanks federal and state law enforcement for their hard work.' Hmmm. It doesn't say any more about him, like where he went to school. Even his age.”

“There. It's not him. If he was a medical student, it would say so. That's a relevant detail.”

“True,” Christine said, but her heart was still racing. She scrolled down to the end of the story and tapped a camera icon for the video. A freeze-frame showing the group of police officers came onto the screen, and she hit
PLAY
. The video showed the police walking and behind them, a thatch of blond hair bobbing up and down. She couldn't see the prisoner's face because the police blocked the view, and sunlight coming through the car window made it hard to see her screen. She hit
PAUSE
. “Can we pull over so I can see this?”

“Do we have to? We'll be home in twenty minutes.” Marcus kept driving, his expression opaque behind the sport sunglasses.

“I don't want to wait. Just pull over, it'll take a minute. We can watch it together.”

“Fine.” Marcus peeled off the road onto a gravel service road that traveled uphill into the woods, ending in a tall mound of discarded logs and tree limbs, then he put the car in
PARK
and shifted over toward her in the seat. “Let me see what you're talking about.”

“Thanks.” Christine hit
PLAY
, and they both watched the video, which showed the police walking below the frame and then in the next instant, the tall blond prisoner walking with them, his hands behind his back.

“It doesn't look like him. Our guy's taller.”

Christine pressed
STOP
. “You can't tell how tall he is from this.”

“Yes, you can. Look at him in relation to the cops.”

“But you don't know how tall the cops are.”

“The cops look like they're just under six feet, which makes sense. They're not staties. Staties tend to be taller. Besides, you know I have eagle eyes.”

Christine knew that was true. A lifetime of playing golf had made Marcus almost preternaturally skilled at guessing distances, and he had an engineer's sense of spatial relationships, which she lacked completely.

“Besides, he looks older than our donor. Our guy should be about twenty-five, I think. That guy looks over thirty.”

“I can't tell how old the guy is from this picture. Anyway, a twenty-five-year-old doesn't look a lot different from a thirty-year-old.” Christine squinted at the video image, which was still hard to see in the car.

“Yes they do. Our guy is young. A kid, a med student. This prisoner is not young.”

“But we don't know when our donor entered med school. We only know that he was accepted.” Christine gestured at the video. “Think about it. He's tired, not old. He's been on the run from the police.”

“It doesn't say that.”

“I'm assuming.” Christine hit
PLAY
, and the video continued, the cops coming forward and the prisoner coming into view, from the waist up. He had on a rumpled navy Windbreaker and a white T-shirt underneath, but she couldn't see his face because his head was tilted down. His blond hair caught the sunlight at the crown, showing its darker caramel tones. Christine pressed
PAUSE
. “That looks like our donor's hair color, doesn't it?”

“I don't know, I don't remember.”

“I do.” Christine scrutinized the man's hair, thinking that she remembered his hair color, only because she always spent time noticing variations of blonde, so she could tell her colorist what she wanted. She'd been highlighting her hair for a long time, but she was always looking in magazines to get new color ideas, so she had the blond vocabulary. “His hair color was tawny. Not ashy like you, but a warm golden, like caramel, not cool Scandinavian—”

Marcus rolled his eyes. “Are you
trying
to make yourself crazy?”

“Let's keep watching.” Christine hit
PLAY
and watched the video as a fine spray of the prisoner's bangs blew off his face. She remembered that she had noted the fineness of their donor's hair in the photo of him. She remembered she had even talked about it with Lauren.

Best. Hair. Ever,
Lauren had said, eyeing the photo in Christine's phone.
Do they charge extra?

It said in the profile that his hair is fine.

Oh, it's fine, all right. He's fine, too. Meow mix.

Please don't lust after my donor.

Christine pressed the memory from her mind, and she and Marcus watched in silence as the video played. In the next few frames, the prisoner was led to the police cruiser and put in the backseat. Marcus stiffened beside her, which told her that he wasn't completely dismissing her worries, and she held her breath, waiting for the telltale shot of the prisoner looking up, just before he was closed inside the squad car.

“Here!” Christine blurted out, experiencing the same flash of recognition that she had in the teachers' lounge. She hit
PAUSE
, freezing the prisoner, who was looking up. His eyes were round and blue. He had that same look about him, an aspect that regarded the world with curiosity and intelligence. She had thought the same thing when she first saw his photo online. She was a visual learner, she knew that about herself. This image, it was fixed in her brain. “I swear, that's—”

“
Not
him,” Marcus interrupted, his tone dead certain. “That's not him.”

“What makes you say that? I think I recognize him. I think it is him. It looks like him.”

“No, it doesn't.” Marcus frowned.

“How is it different?” Christine looked over, her heart in her throat, begging him to say words that would convince her. He
had
to convince her. She
couldn't
be right. She
had
to be wrong.

“Our guy had like a wider face, here, across his cheekbones.” Marcus drew a line under his eyes, with his fingers. “I remember thinking, pick him. My dad has broad cheekbones like that and I have my dad's cheekbones, the Nilsson cheekbones. Remember when you first met me, you said something about my cheekbones? I remember thinking, what is it with women and cheekbones?”

“What's your point?”

“I'm saying, look at the cheekbones of this guy in the video. They're not as broad as my dad's. My dad's a heavy-boned Swede, and I have the same cheekbones. That's what I liked about our donor, one of the things. There was Swedish in his background, the bio said it. You can check it.” Marcus waved airily at the video. “He's not our guy.”

“But what about the eyes?” Christine pointed, unconvinced. “They're big and round, like our donor's.”

“A lot of people have big, round eyes. I do.”

“But don't they look like the ones in the donor photo to you?”

“No, not at all.” Marcus tapped her phone screen with his index finger, and the video ended, showing the prisoner shut inside the police cruiser. “Now can we go home?”

“Hold on a second.” Christine tapped her phone, navigated out of Safari, and found her photos, then started swiping backwards through the pictures of her cat, dog, and garden.

“What now? What are you doing?”

“Finding his picture.”

“You have a picture of our
donor
in your phone?” Marcus peered over his sunglasses in surprise. “Why?”

Christine kept swiping. “I wanted to show Lauren.”

“You could have showed her online. They sent it to us by email.”

“Maybe, but I had it in my phone. I saved it.” Christine felt vaguely busted. “I save pictures of everything, you know that. Everybody does.”

“Okay, whatever.”

“Wait. Look.” Christine swiped back through the photos of the nurses and techs at Families First, girl selfies with everybody hugging or making duck faces, and then she finally reached the picture of their donor as a little boy. She tried to look at it with new eyes, but she couldn't fight the feeling that he looked like the man in the video.

“Pssh.” Marcus shook his head. “It's a little blond boy.”

“You don't think that looks like the guy in the video?”

“No, and I don't think it's him.”

Christine swiped to the next picture, which was their donor as an adult, and her heart stopped. She didn't know if she could say it out loud, but her brain was telling her something. She recognized that face.

“Nope.” Marcus moved away and put the car in gear. “Granted, it looks a
little
like him, but it's obviously not him.”

“How is it obvious?”

“I'm telling you, our guy has a wider face than the guy in the video.” Marcus hit the gas, steering the car onto the main road. “The coloring is similar, I'll give you that, but blond people have basically the same coloring. Blond hair, blue eyes, light skin. My dad always said we glowed in the dark.”

“But what about the way he looks around the eyes, his aspect?”

“What about his aspect?” Marcus drove without glancing over.

“It's his attitude, the way he looks out at the world.”

“I know what a person's aspect means. I just don't see what you see in his aspect. In any event, what difference does
aspect
make?”

“I feel like the guy in the video has the same aspect as our guy. Alert. Engaged. Intellectually curious.” Christine's stomach clenched. Trees whizzed by, and cars were coming in the opposite direction. She thought Marcus was driving too fast but didn't say anything.

“So he looks curiously and intelligently at the world.” Marcus snorted. “It's not our guy.”

“I feel like it might be.” Christine began to feel sick to her stomach, but she prayed it was only her hormones. Her first two months had been rocky, and she threw up every morning. The only time she felt good was after she had thrown up, which was a sorry state of affairs.

“Worry, worry, worry. You worry too much. Don't worry.”

“It's worrisome.”

“Tell you what, honey. When we get home, look at the video on the laptop. You'll be able to see it better on a bigger screen. If you want, call Lauren.” Marcus looked over, but Christine couldn't see his eyes behind his wraparound sunglasses. All she saw was a reflection of her own frown, distorted in their dark curve.

“What if she agrees with me?”

“If Lauren agrees with you, then you're both nuts.”

 

Chapter Three

Christine followed Marcus inside the house, slid her laptop from her quilted tote, left her purse on the chair, and kicked off her flats. Her nausea had abated slightly, and the cool of the house came as a relief. They kept the central air on during the day since she'd gotten pregnant, and it was worth the money. Marcus went ahead of her into the kitchen, and she padded after him across the hardwood floor, patting their dog Murphy on the head when he came to greet them, wagging his thick comma of a tail. Murphy was a chubby yellow Lab, still hyperactive at six years old, so they'd finally given up waiting for him to mellow. His nature was gentle enough to ignore their cranky orange tabby Marmalade, nicknamed Lady, which they had rescued back in the days when they were practicing for the kids they couldn't have.