Michael Baden - Skeleton justice

Her flimsy shoe, which had been tracing a delicate pattern up and down his calf, crashed down on his instep like a guillotine. He grinned. The pain was worth it.

After the waiter finally left with an uncontroversial order of salad, appetizer, pasta, and steak, Jake set about making amends.

"I was hoping you'd help me brainstorm." Jake edged the case folder toward Manny, and caught her glancing at the label. "Will you take a look for me?"

Manny twisted around to face him and flipped the folder open. "Other men seduce women by telling them they're beautiful and sexy. You do it by whispering pathology reports in my ear."

Jake grinned. "I admire you too much to take such a hackneyed approach. Look at this."

Manny and Jake began to sort through the paperwork, focusing on the test results from Vampire victims that he had brought with him. Jake stared at the jumble of numbers and medical terminology. What was it the Vampire was looking for in this blood? None of the toxicology reports showed substances normally associated with drug abuse, so the victims weren't linked through a shared drug habit. Another door closed.

By the time the appetizer arrived, the waiter had to struggle to find a paper-free spot on the table to set Jake's calamari.

Manny stared at the reports. "No motive?"

"None. Pasquarelli thinks he's a nut. But there's more here. These are organized blood draws. They don't have the characteristics of a disorganized mind. The victims didn't know what happened to them until they woke up and saw the holes in their skin or the blood droplets on their clothes, the swelling, the beginnings of black-and-blue marks. Hallmarks of neat, precise, and carefully plotted attacks."

"The Devil Bat," Manny muttered.

Jake gulped from his glass of ice water and waited. Manny was usually very analytical, yet totally open to every possibility, able to see connections a more cautious mind would overlook. That passion, that lightning response, had attracted him in the first place. But sometimes her sudden reversals, the wild leaps in her thought process, left his relentlessly logical mind floundering.

"A forties horror movie with Bela Lugosi," she explained. "Used to watch the reruns with my father when I was growing up."

Signs of a misspent youth, he thought, but he didn't say it aloud, or else the spike of her heel would be in his calf, rather than massaging it.

"The movie's villain was a beloved town doctor who killed to seek revenge for wrongs he perceived had been committed against him."

"You have something against doctors?"

"I'm a lawyer, remember. A mixed marriage between the two professions would never work. Like the Hatfields and McCoys."

"Or Romeo and Juliet."

"They committed suicide. I rest my case."

Jake shuffled his papers to bring Manny back to the here and now.

"Blood is what the guy is after, so somehow these people must be linked by their blood," she said. "Do they share a common disease?"

"None of them is HIV-positive. Two are diabetic. One must be an alcoholic-terrible liver function." Jake rattled off the facts, tapping the pertinent data with the tip of his pencil. "But those are the results of running standard blood work. We can't test for every obscure disease in the book-it would take forever. We have to have some idea of what to look for, then run the test to prove or disprove the theory. Otherwise, you're searching for a needle in a haystack."

"So they could all be linked by having some rare disease, but you just don't know which one?"

"Possible, but unlikely. The police CSI team interviewed them all. No one has any unusual symptoms or medical history."

"What about the DNA profile?"

"The results have come back on only the first three. We're still waiting on the two latest. But these people are not related. And no genetic anomalies."

Manny chewed a zucchini flower and thought for a long moment before speaking. "Do you know how much blood he draws?"

"It's impossible to know the precise amount, but the victims were all checked out after the attacks and they had normal blood volume, so he's probably taking a vial at most."

"All right." Manny gestured with a forkful of draped arugula. "My knowledge of bizarre satanic rituals is admittedly small, but it seems to me if he were taking the blood for some kinky reason, he'd want more of it, yes?"

"I agree," Jake said. "I think he's doing what we're doing-testing it."

"Himself, or sending it to a lab?"

"Certain basic tests he could do himself with the right materials, or he could send the blood out to a lab. There are hundreds on the East Coast alone. We'd never be able to check them all."

"But not for DNA testing," Manny prompted. "You can't do that on your kitchen table. And because of the backlog, it usually takes months to get DNA results back. Believe me, my innocent clients know how behind those labs are."

"Those are the labs accredited to do forensic DNA testing. There are private labs, too, like the ones you see ads for on the subway-places that do paternity testing for civil cases."

"I wouldn't know. I haven't been underground in New York City since the St. James class trip to the Museum of Natural History."

Jake let her comment pass. Every once in a while, Manny's Jersey girl bridge and tunnel gene reared its head. He preferred not to dwell on the fact that when she had been puzzling over Dick and Jane in her green plaid Catholic school uniform, he had been a senior at City College. He waggled his pen at her. "But why go to all the trouble of collecting blood if all you want is a DNA match? He could get that much more easily by collecting a few hairs or picking up a cigarette butt from his targets. What he's looking for has to be something you can find only in blood."

"So tell Pasquarelli to start subpoenaing every blood lab in the metro area till he finds the one that worked on these samples."

Jake massaged his temples at the thought of the massive paperwork this would entail. "Pasquarelli's already thought of that. He was hoping I could come up with something a little less labor-intensive. But I guess the Vampire will stay on the front page of the papers for another week. The mayor won't be happy."

"Pasquarelli may be in luck there," Manny replied. "I was listening to the evening news while I was getting dressed tonight. The Vampire's been pushed aside by the Preppy Terrorists."

"And who, pray tell, are the Preppy Terrorists?" Jake dug into his steak, trying to ignore the sensation of Manny's gaze boring into him. It was like eating while Mycroft watched every bite travel from plate to mouth. "Did you want to try some of this?"

"Certainly not! This hand-rolled fettucine is just delicious." Manny slowly sucked a strand between her lips to prove her point, then continued. "The Preppy Terrorists are a couple of kids from the Monet Academy who got it in their heads that it would be a fun science experiment to put a small incendiary device under a U.S. mailbox in Hoboken."

"That's pushing the Vampire off the front page? We used to put firecrackers in old man Isbrantsen's mailbox whenever he'd confiscate our kickball."

"Was a federal judge ever strolling by when you did it? Because that's what happened in Hoboken. Judge Patrick Brueninger took a piece of twisted metal in the throat."

"Brueninger. That name sounds familiar. Wait-wasn't he the federal judge who presided over the Iqbar case?"

"You got it."

Jake drained the last of his Chianti. "These kids tried to take him down? Why?"

"Too soon to know," Manny said. "There are certainly quite a few Muslims who don't think the mullah got a fair trial. They swear that Iqbar really was just running a nice friendly mosque in Jersey City."

Jake snorted. "Right. Not laundering millions to finance the Taliban in Afghanistan. But these prep school boys aren't Muslims, right? Why would they want to off the judge?"