Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

He was about to tell her so, then suggest they put it behind them and make the best of her time here, when she added, “I don’t know if I can ever win your trust back. I’d like to try, but I won’t stay if my being around makes you feel I compromised you, your practice, or your investigation. Just give the word, and I’ll leave in the morning.”

That surprised him. Her words sounded as if she’d been reading from a carefully written note, with the ring of an ultimatum. But he also knew something else. When this case ended, he’d have to come to grips with the fact his ineptness might have cost a man his life. Measured against that, whatever technical dings his reputation as coroner took in the process would no longer matter. Yet going back to his old existence, living alone in the house where he’d been born and practicing medicine in isolation, would be even lonelier than before, entirely because of her having been here. He realized this without having to think about it or put it into words. It came to him the way an animal senses its terrain is no longer hospitable, through a combination of instinct and intuition that reads a warning to move on and find more fertile ground, yet she’d catalyzed the process. All at once he felt cautious about how to handle the next few minutes with this strange, forceful, and disquieting woman who had entered his life.

“Basically I still think you need me around here, and more than just professionally,” she continued “You’re one lonely bugger.”

He gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Any other revelations you’d care to reveal?”

“Yes.”

“Oh?”

She held her head a notch higher. The light from an oncoming car caught the fine lines of her nose and jaw, making him think she looked absolutely regal.

He held his breath, and waited for it.

“I don’t have a fiancé.”

He reacted with a mix of relief, pleasant surprise, and a self-congratulatory he’d-known-something-was-fishy-about-her-engagement-all-along celebration. Where there had been doubt and suspicion seconds before, there was the glimmer of a new possibility here. It had nothing to do with the grim business that seemed to be closing in on them, but a sea change occurred inside his head. As he sometimes did in a tense moment, he laughed. “Why the pretends?”

By the light of the dashboard he could see her face. She pursed her lips, but the corners played at breaking into a smile. “I heard you were a real womanizer and figured it was the best way to avoid trouble.”

“Womanizer? Who told you that?”

“The other residents who’d done a rotation with you. All your patients gabbed to them about the string of women you get up here, and how none of them stay. Let’s see, there was a theater director, a physiotherapist, and a veterinarian-”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Having met you, I personally think they must have been nuts.”

“Well, thank you for that at least. Residents should know better than to believe country gossip-”

“Oh, I don’t mean them. I’m talking about your lady friends, for not wanting to stay, silly.”

He still hadn’t come up with a reply to that when his cell phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Dr. Roper, you don’t know me,” a woman’s voice said. “I got your number from the book. You answered the phone when I called Victor’s house this morning.”

“Oh, yes. I recall your voice.” He heard her suck in her breath, but she said nothing. “May I know who I’m talking to?”

He listened to her breathing a few seconds. Finally, she said, “ I have some documents that belong to Victor. I didn’t know what had happened when I tried to reach him. I feel terrible, first the firing, and now…”

He slowed, and pulled over to the side of the road. “Let me call you back-”

“No! I don’t want anyone to know who I am.”

He didn’t want to lose her again.

“Then let me give you another number where to reach me.” He’d take the call at Nell’s. She and Lucy could wait in the Jeep. “In about ten minutes?”

“No. I’m freezing my buns off as it is in a pay phone.”

Oh, God. He’d have to risk being overheard. As long as she didn’t say her name, at least she’d be safe. “What documents?” He motioned Lucy to slide over and listen with him. She responded immediately, a puzzled expression on her face.

“You mustn’t tell anyone about this. We’ve had orders not to talk with you about him.”

“We?”

“The people who worked with Victor at Nucleus Labs.”

Her breathing sounded in his ear a few seconds. He could even hear her shivering. She must have her lips pressed to the mouthpiece.

“What do you want to do?” he asked. “We could meet.”

“No.”

“I could pick these documents up.”

More breathing.

“Tell me what you have then.” He felt cold just listening to her.

“Maybe I better explain how I got them in the first place. I don’t want to get in trouble with the police.”

He opened his mouth to stop her, but she pressed ahead.

“Victor programs his PC at home to forward whatever files he’s working on to both his and my computer at our offices whenever he shuts down-” She stopped and let out a breath that stuttered into a sobbing sound. After a few seconds, she said, “I mean he used to. I still can’t believe he’s dead.”

She may already be saying too much. “Listen, you should call me on a regular phone before saying anything more. I’m on a cell phone,” Mark warned her, all the while worried he might lose her for good.

He thought he heard her swallow. “No, I can hear you okay, and I want to get this over with. He’d set the system up that way so we’d always be sure to have his files the next morning in case he forgot to forward them manually. For a bright man, he sometimes had a mind like a sieve…”

She didn’t understand. But if he spelled it out that someone might be listening in… Christ it was too late anyway.

“He obviously didn’t delete that function, because a folder dated yesterday was on top of my e-mail when I got to work. The first pages were nothing special, results of genetic screenings we’d done on various groups of siblings, mainly for different sorts of cancer genes. You’ve probably seen the type of reports I’m talking about in your own practice.”

He had. They were a bunch of spikes along a horizontal line, each peak representing the amount of a particular sequence of DNA, the building blocks of the gene under investigation, including a peak or peaks for the mutated section, if it’s present. These defective portions stood out like sore thumbs when compared to a similar preparation of a normal strand, even to the untrained eye. “Victor left me a message saying he’d retrieved some test results that he’d found peculiar. Could they be the ones?”

“Peculiar? Not that I could tell. The only thing odd about them was that they’d been flagged for some reason, yet there were no obvious abnormal spikes. I wouldn’t know how to read the finer details well enough to have spotted anything else. Victor could have, though. He had the knack, and the training. In fact I initially thought they were copies he’d been using to practice his interpretation skills on and had simply returned them. It was the next few pages that got me concerned. As soon as I read them, I knew they were nothing anyone at Nucleus Labs had been meant to see. When I phoned his house, it was to ask him what he wanted me to do with the file. But you answered. By midmorning word got around that he’d died, probably from a heart attack, and I was devastated. But when we found out the police were all over his house, I got frightened. After all, I know you don’t bring out the yellow tape for simple coronaries, and after seeing what he’d been doing on the computer, well, my imagination went into overdrive.”