In the Blood (17 page)

The stage of the chapel was about eighty feet wide and fifty feet deep, the depth necessary for the pulpit, the band, and the choir’s eight rows of risers. The area was lit from six stories above by a lighting system an arena-rock band would have admired. Two huge video monitors flanked the stage.

Taking front and center of the stage was Richard Bloessing Scaler, his suit white, his casket hammered brass, his hands laced over a black bible. Above the casket was the pulpit, looking like the helm of a sailing ship, if helms were white and gold and inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

The bereaved elite sat in velvet-upholstered chairs behind the pulpit. Closest to the casket was Patricia Scaler. She was in the requisite black with a veil so dense it seemed opaque, as if she had believed it would wall her off from the thousands of incoming mourners and reporters. I felt deep sadness for her.

I saw Fossie beside Mrs Scaler, his eyes drifting over the crowd. After a few minutes I saw her move from Fossie’s side to Senator Custis. She
leaned low, spoke a few words, and sat beside him. He put his hand over her forearm, gave a squeeze of reassurance.

Sitting in the other chairs – many still arriving – was an assemblage of what I assumed were friends and people from the college and various Scaler media enterprises, though I could recognize only two: Dean Tutweiler, looking amply doleful, and the lawyer Carleton, sitting beside the Dean and whispering in his ear, probably putting the funeral on the clock. Looking down into the front rows of the congregation, I recognized several other notable right-wing televangelists, out to pay their respects to a colleague in the industry. Or maybe making sure he was dead.

We watched a half-dozen orations which, save for the vocalizations, sounded the same. Between speeches the choir sang hymns. When I’d shoot a glance at Mrs Scaler she remained in the same position, unmoved by so much as a breath, hiding in the fortress of her grief.

After nearly an hour of hagiography, Custis took his position at the podium, the main event. He tapped the mic and asked for more volume. The senator cleared his throat, then opened his hands toward the man in the casket below the podium.

“I’ve known this beautiful man since his days as a simple country pastor in a small church. It feels like a hundred years, such has been the Reverend Richard Scaler’s influence on my life and devotion to our Lord. Here lies a true man of
God, a warrior for righteousness, a soldier of Heaven, the vanguard scout for the legions of Truth and the point man for Jesus Christ our Eternal Savior…”

Custis’s voice boomed from the walls. Amens arose from the crowd. I heard Harry mutter something. A sixtyish, blubber-necked white guy in the pew beside us turned to see a black guy talking to himself. Blubber-neck couldn’t hide his disgust.

Harry looked back. I couldn’t see the expression on my partner’s face, but the white guy turned even whiter and snapped his head back to Custis’s eulogy.

“…Richard and I were two sons of the South, scions of small towns close to one another. It was a simpler time then, a better time then…before the hippies and the nay-sayers and the America-haters took to the streets, before the Godless heathens stormed the gates of rectitude…”

More
amen
s from the crowd, though I saw less-hardened faces looking uncomfortable at Custis’s opportunistic language. The raw politician in Custis sensed the same, backed it down.

“…Then the seventies came with what Richard later called his ‘finding’ period. Finding who he was, discovering his full potential as a preacher, though he had preached since the age of four. He could have given it all up, my friends. Or stayed in his small country church away from the great responsibility he later undertook. I knew him then just as I knew his beloved Patricia then, and I
hope that my friendship was some inspiration to him…”

I took as much as I could stomach and left, Harry on my heels.

When we arrived at the department, Tom Mason whistled me to his office. “You can come along, too, Harry,” Tom added.

I sat, Harry stood. “Got us a li’l problem here,” Tom said, looking at me.

“Which is?”

Tom picked up a sheet from his desk, put on reading glasses. “A woman name of Vernia Teasdale and a Mr Jameson Daniels signed a complaint avowing that, lacking proper cause, you entered their domicile yesterday and broke camera equipment, a table, and caused them to be in fear of their lives. They say you scared them so much they locked themselves in the bathroom until you left.”

I shook my head. “Teasdale is the mama of Terry Lee Bailes, the guy who tried to abduct the baby at the hospital,” I explained. “I was there to inform Mrs Teasdale of the death of her son. She became emotional. The man with her didn’t like me causing her distress. They were shooting a porn movie or performing for an internet audience when I arrived. A marijuana roach was found on the premises – seen when the door was open, proper cause. The aforementioned man took offense at my ability to arrest him. There was a small scuffle. Objects fell.”

“No one was arrested because of…?” Tom asked.

“I didn’t want to place the woman under any more emotional duress, Tom. She was having a tough day, her son dead and all.”

Tom studied a pair of rap sheets. “Both of ’em got records, low-life stuff: misdemeanor dope busts and three DUIs on Teasdale, Daniels has grand theft auto, second-degree assault. It’ll turn into your word against theirs, and the judge’ll throw their charges out like a week-old biscuit. I don’t see a problem here, do I?”

“Nope,” I said. “Because there is none.” I laced my fingers behind my head and smiled at Harry. He frowned back at me.

What
? I mouthed.

He looked away. I stood and headed out the door, went to my desk. When I turned back, Harry was still in Tom’s office, only this time the door was closed.

Harry was scheduled for another meeting at the District Attorney’s office, which left me to attend the autopsy on Bailes. Leaving Harry still in with Tom, I went to the morgue. The pathologist handling Bailes was Ernie Hemmings, a rotund black man with huge sleepy eyes, octagonal glasses, and a constant smile as bright as his hairless pate. I always saw Ernie as a character in
Alice Through the Looking Glass
, the Cheshire Pathologist, maybe.

Ernie was studying a report as I entered.

“The blood screen on Bailes,” he said, frowning at various numbers on the pages. “We got some interesting hits including a Prozac-type substance. Plus the stuff you’d expect, like THC and meth. And one big surprise, Stenebrexia.”

“What the hell’s Stene-whatever.”

“I suppose you could call it a psychotropic dis-inhibitor. It was developed to help people with inhibitions and anxiety disorders, like stage fright
and agoraphobia. But the stuff interacts poorly with other drugs, common ones like Prozac and the ilk. It can actually promote anxiety, plus odd behavior and acting out.”

“But if the stuff dissipates fear, it could have helped Bailes step into the hospital.”

“You’re right. It could have made it easier. Thing is, Stenebrexia is only legally available in a half-dozen countries, the US not one of them.”

“Pharmaceuticals seem able to float over borders, right?”

Ernie nodded, turned to study Bailes’s misshapen face. “Maybe the guy was afraid of his mirror. Anyway, time for the show.”

When Hemmings pushed the scalpel into the swastika tat on Bailes’s sternum and pulled it south, I started from the room.

“You’re leaving?” Hemmings said.

“I’m not paid enough to watch you root through garbage. I’ll be back.”

I jammed my hands in my pockets, went out a side door, and cut to the parking lot. I found a coffee shop with a television and watched CNN – abducted woman of the week, children starved in a basement, a man poisoned to death by his wife – until I duked the clerk five bucks to switch to the Weather Channel. When I returned to the morgue, Hemmings was lacing Bailes’s abdomen shut with stitching like shoelaces. The Frankenstein stitches fit the lopsided face.

“He was pretty eaten up inside, right?” I asked.

“Pardon?”

“Pancreatic cancer? Terminal?”

Hemmings frowned and tapped Bailes’s gut. “Our boy here might have died of hepatic failure in twenty or so years if he kept drinking and drugging. Outside of incipient hardening of the liver, the guy was basically healthy, Carson. Who told you he had cancer?”

I re-ran Kirkson’s words in my head…

“Terry Lee visited here a week back and told me. He was crying like a fucking baby. I told him to man up, live the rest of his life like there was nothing to lose.”

I was sure Kirkson hadn’t been lying. The details were too real, plus Kirkson had the image of being bunked with an aroused Thunderhead Wallace to keep him truthful.

“That’s not the question,” I said. “The question is, who told Bailes he was sick?”

Hemmings shrugged, snipped off a stitch. “You gotta figure it was a doctor, right?”

“Dr Bascomb? Are you there?”

Dr Bernard Bascomb, senior biomedical researcher at New Zealand’s University of Auckland School of Medicine, was reluctant to turn his eyes from the slender ankles of his new research assistant. She was currently hunched over a microscope in the bright lab outside his office, her ankles trim and elegant and, given the ample revelation of calf beneath the back of her lab jacket and the floor,
very European, though his researcher was obviously part Maori.

“Dr Bascomb? I say, are you there?”

The latter heritage was reflected in a darker skin tone, high-cheekboned facial structure, and her musical, integrated name, Alicia Apatari. She was a lovely creature who, at twenty-two, would consider him a doddering old clutcher, though he was barely sixty and could play badminton like a forty-year-old.

“Hello-oo…Dr Bascomb?”

He would have loved to have considered Alicia Apatari’s Euro-Maori ankles all afternoon, but Bascomb’s intercom was buzzing and the evil crone who intercepted visitors was yowling his name like a dyspeptic cat.

“Dr Bascomb…are you there? Doctor?”

Bascomb’s finger jabbed the response button. “What is it this time, Miss Trendle?”

“You’re there, then.”

“No, I’m not here. I departed a half-hour ago.”

A pause as she digested the information. Then, irritation.
“You have a visitor. A Dr Matthias from the US. He said he had an appointment.”

Bascomb shot a glance at his calendar and winced. He was a day off.

“Yes, yes…send him in.”

The receptionist’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“This Matthias, Doctor. Is he the one that had all the, uh, publicity a few years back? When he said American black people were…”

Bascomb rapped the case of the intercom with a chubby knuckle. “Is the machine not functioning, Miss Trendle? Or did I not make myself clear? Send Dr Matthias in.”

“
To be sure.
” The receptionist’s voice had gone sub-zero.

Bascomb’s hands swept over his desk, arranging and tidying. A messy desk suggested an untidy mind. And the mind about to enter his office had been – no, was – one of the most distinctive in genetics, no matter what so many others thought.

Idiots. Retrogrades.

“Hello, Bernard,” a voice said as a face appeared at Bascomb’s door, small and tan. The tanned flesh fit, Bascomb noted; Matthias’s retirement had taken him to one of the US states on the Gulf of Mexico.

“Kurt!” Bernard said. “Make yourself at home in my small dominion.”

Matthias entered. He wore a black suit sculpted to a hard, diminutive body, a jockey’s body, Bascomb thought.
Would I be surprised if he rode into my office on a black horse? Probably not.
Matthias’s pinpoint eyes were like green lasers behind gleaming wire bifocals.

Bascomb leaned over his desk to extend his hand, remembered Matthias didn’t like to be touched. He turned the motion into a shuffling of papers as Matthias sat in a wingback chair across from Bernard’s ample oaken desk. Matthias set the rattling brown briefcase down by his side.

“Excuse the clutter, Kurt. My needs exceed my space. A man of your distinction must have had a much larger office. I mean, must, uh,
have
a much larger office.” Bascomb reddened at using the past tense.

“Everyone knows I’m retired from the university life. I’m working for a private concern. And, of course, I have several patents that provide a bit of income.”

“Good for you, Kurt. We haven’t been face to face since…when? The symposium in Lucerne? Eight years back? You were still advising on the Human Genome Project, Kurt. I remember your monograph on the A allele and genetic drift. A triumph.”

Matthias backhanded the praise away, a man swatting a fly. “At the time. But the field evolves so fast. Unlike us, Bernard. We get stuck in…” Matthias paused, seemed on the verge of saying more, demurred, changed the subject. “Your email of last week said you were able to get the research I requested?”

“What there was. You’ve been seeking the same sort of research in Australia, I expect?”

“There’s a decent body of research over there,” Matthias said. “The Aborigines, you know. I also had a secondary interest in the country’s Asians. You know there’s a Chinatown in Sydney? A rather expansive one?”

“The Dixon Street area. You were there, I take it?”

“I had to do field research in the vicinity. As well as in the outback.”

“Who was your contact in Australia, Kurt? Marnick at the AGRF? Or someone from the U of Queensland?”

Matthias’s eye hardened. “I’ll keep that name confidential at present, Bernard. I hope you’ll understand. I intend to do the same with yours.”

Bascomb shrugged and looked away, thinking it perhaps wasn’t such a bad idea, given past events. He reached to the corner of his desk, pulling a four-inch stack of papers in front of him. “Some of your specifics, especially race-mixing, are not an area of official governmental inquiry, at least not in decades. There are some rather surreptitious references on miscegenation with the Aborigines, data acquired on the QT. But there’s a hefty dollop of other information. Bureaucrats love to amass data, don’t they?”