Jonathan Kellerman - Blood Test

He was hunched over his desk scrawling notations on the draft of a research paper. I knocked lightly on the open door.

“Alex!” He rose to greet me. “How did it go? Did you convince them?”

I recounted what we’d found.

“Oh my God!” He slumped in his chair. “This is unbelievable. Unbelievable.” He exhaled, compressed his jowls with his hands, picked up a pencil and rolled it up and down the surface of the desk.

“Was there much blood?”

“One stain about six inches wide.”

“Not enough for a bleed-out,” he muttered to himself. “No other fluids? No bile, no vomitus?”

“I didn’t see any. It was hard to tell. The place was a shambles.”

“A barbaric rite, no doubt. I told you, Alex, they are madmen, those damned Touchers! To steal a child and then to run amok like that! Holism is nothing more than a cover for anarchy and nihilism!”

He was jumping to conclusions in quantum leaps but I had neither the desire nor the energy to argue with him.

“The police, what did they do?”

“The detective who ran the show is a friend of mine. He came down as a favor. There’s an All Points Bulletin out on the family, the sheriff in La Vista has been notified to watch for them. They did a crime scene analysis and filed a report. That’s it. Unless you decide to push it.”

“Your friend — is he discreet?”

“Very.”

“Good. We can’t afford a media side show. Have you ever talked to the press? They are idiots, Alex, and vultures! The blonds from the television stations are the worst. Vapid, with paste-on smiles, always trying to trick you into making outrageous statements. Barely a week goes by that one of them doesn’t attempt to get me to say that the cure for cancer is just around the corner. They want instant information, immediate gratification. Can you imagine what they’ll do with something like this?”

He’d gone quickly from defeatism to rage and the excess energy propelled him out of his chair. He traversed the length of the office with short nervous steps, pounding his fist into his hand, swerved to avoid the piles of books and manuscripts, walked back to the desk, and cursed in Spanish.

“Do you think I should go to court, Alex?”

“It’s a tough question. You need to decide if going public will help the boy. Have you done it before?”

“Once. Last year we had a little girl who needed transfusions. The family were Jehovah’s Witnesses and we had to get an injunction to give her blood. But that was different. The parents weren’t fighting us. Their attitude was, our beliefs don’t allow us to give you permission, but if we’re forced to comply we will. They wanted to save their child, Alex, and were happy when we took the responsibility away from them. That child is alive today and thriving. The Swope boy should be thriving, too, not dying in the back room of some scabrous voodoo den.”

He thrust his hand into the pocket of his white coat, removed a packet of saltine crackers, tore open the plastic, and nibbled on the crackers until they were consumed. After brushing crumbs out of his mustache he continued.

“Even in the Witness case the media tried to make a cause célèbre of it, implying that we were coercing the family. One of the stations sent around a moron masquerading as a medical reporter to interview me — probably one of those fellows who wanted to be a doctor but flunked his science courses. He swaggered in with a little tape recorder and addressed me by my first name , Alex! As if we were buddies! I dismissed him and he made the ‘no comment’ sound like concealment of guilt. Fortunately the parents took our advice and refused to talk to them, too. At that point the so-called controversy died a quick death — no carrion, the vultures go elsewhere.”

The door leading to the lab opened and a young woman clutching a clipboard entered the office. She had light light brown hair cut in a page boy, round eyes that uncannily matched the hair, pinched features, and a petulant mouth. The hand holding the clipboard was pale, and her nails were gnawed to the quick. She wore a lab coat that reached below her knees and crepe-soled flats on her feet.

She looked through me to Raoul and said, “There’s something you should see. Could be exciting.” The lack of inflection in her voice belied the content of her message.

Raoul got up. “Is it the new membrane, Helen?”

“Yes.”

“Wonderful.” He looked as if he were going to hug her then stopped suddenly, remembering my presence. Clearing his throat, he introduced us: “Alex, meet a fellow Ph.D., Dr. Helen Holroyd.”

We exchanged the most cursory of pleasantries. She edged closer to Raoul, a proprietary gleam in the beige eyes. He fought, unsuccessfully, to erase the naughty boy look from his face.

The two of them were trying so hard to look platonic that for the first time all day I felt like smiling. They were sleeping together and it was supposed to be a secret. Without a doubt everyone in the department knew about it.

“I’ve got to get going,” I said.

“Yes, I understand. Thank you for everything. I may call you to discuss this further. In the meantime, send your bill to my secretary.”

As I walked out the door they were gazing into each other’s eyes and discussing the wonders of osmotic equilibrium.

On the way out I stopped in the hospital cafeteria for a cup of coffee. It was after seven and the dining room was sparsely populated. A tall Mexican man wearing a hair net and blue scrubs ran a dry mop over the floor. A trio of nurses laughed and ate doughnuts. I lidded the coffee and was preparing to leave when movement fluttered in the corner of my eye.

It was Valcroix and he was waving me over. I walked to his table.

“Care to join me?”

“All right.” I put down my cup and took a chair facing him. The remains of a giant salad sat on his tray along with two glasses of water. He used his fork to move a tumbleweed of alfalfa sprouts around the bowl.

He’d traded his psychedelic sport shirt for a black Grateful Dead T-shirt and had tossed his white coat over the chair next to him. From up close I could see that the long hair was thinning on top. He needed a shave but his beard growth was sparse, spotting only the mustache and chin areas. The drooping face had been worked over by a bad cold; he sniffled, red-nosed and bleary-eyed.

“Any news on the Swopes?” he asked.

I was tired of telling the story but he’d been their doctor and deserved to know. I gave him a brief summary.

He listened with equanimity, no emotion registering in the hooded eyes. When I was finished he coughed and dabbed at his nose with a napkin.

“For some reason I feel an urge to proclaim my innocence to you,” he said.

“That’s hardly necessary,” I assured him. I drank some coffee and put it down quickly, having forgotten how awful it was.

His eyes took on a faraway look and for a moment I thought he was meditating, retreating to an internal world as he’d done during Raoul’s harangue. I found my attention wandering.

“I know Melendez-Lynch blames me for this. He’s blamed me for everything that’s gone wrong in the department since I began my fellowship. Was he that way when you worked with him?”

“Let’s just say it took a while to develop a good working relationship.”

He nodded solemnly, picked some strands from the ball of sprouts and chewed on them.

“Why do you think they ran away?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“No insights at all?”

“None. Why should I have, any more than anyone else?”

“I was under the impression they related well to you.”

“Who told you that?”