Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

Mark jumped right in. “Some of these infants were bound to die in transport. Not many, but more than the mortality rate for healthy newborns at the time. While it would be possible to explain live deformed infants to state authorities with incomplete documents, dead ones were another matter. Those, I believe, he did bury on the grounds of the home, probably no more than three or four. Sheriff Evans found a few locals who remember him finally finishing off the lawn after shutting the place down, replacing a few truckloads of topsoil and bringing in a complete order of sod, something he never managed to do while the place was in business.”

He cast his stare the length of the table at Chaz. “So why did Charles Braden III kill in 1974? Even if his baby racket were found out, he wouldn’t have been guilty of murder at that point. And if manslaughter charges were laid against him for the few infants who perished, I doubt any court would have convicted him since those newborns might not have survived anyway. But he most certainly would have been ruined, professionally and financially, and probably gone to jail – income tax evasion figuring prominently in the charges. For that reason, he murdered Kelly, and, most likely, my father.”

The room had fallen silent.

Chaz didn’t avert his gaze, but looked desolate, as if his mind were in some private wasteland.

Mark, feeling a sudden urge to move, pushed out of his chair and started to pace. “After closing both the maternity center and the home, Charles Braden III confined himself to legitimate medicine and research, carving out a distinguished career over several decades. He also prospered in the business world. The Manhattan corporate elite who were beholden to him for healthy offspring rewarded him with appointments to their boards of directors and offered him stock options, further increasing his wealth and prestige.

“Charles realized, however, that he was still vulnerable, that his baby swapping and tax evasion could still catch up with him through something as simple as incidental blood work prior to a surgical procedure on any of the substituted children. Some of the fathers Braden conspired with have come forward and given us valuable testimony about the measures he took to prevent that from happening. Like the family accountants Sheriff Evans mentioned before, these men didn’t know they’d been in league with a murderer and were just as eager to distance themselves from him by coming clean. ‘Charles warned me that should the daughter he’d given us ever require an operation and undergo blood typing, an alert doctor with access to the rest of our family’s medical files might spot that she couldn’t be progeny of me or my wife,’ one of these men told me. ‘So he instructed me that should any serious health issue arise requiring a possible transfusion, I should let him recommend a specialist who had never cared for me or the rest of my family.’ I heard this story over and over.

“Obviously, the issue could be managed easily while these individuals were young and, odds were, healthy enough that they wouldn’t fall sick with a serious illness anyway. Once they grew old enough to leave the nest, those who moved away were no longer a problem, their medical files now far from those of siblings and parents.

“For the ones who stayed in Manhattan, Braden, under the guise of providing the best care, referred them only to doctors who had contracts with labs that were part of the Braden business empire. Why? Another of these dads explained, ‘As early as the late eighties, when DNA testing first began to have forensic and commercial applications, Charles anticipated that sooner or later genetic screening for abnormal genes might become a routine part of medicine. When that happened, he wanted to be in a position to flag and intercept any test results that reported my son wasn’t our biological offspring.’ Others told a variation of the same story, all of them painting a picture of Charles Braden being smug in the certainty that he’d taken account of all eventualities.

“So for twenty-seven years he believed that he had successfully covered up his crimes and gotten away with murder. I can only speculate as to his thoughts at the time we discovered Kelly’s body. As you may have guessed, Charles himself isn’t telling us anything. But his initial actions suggested a willingness to let the current investigation run its course. Probably he expected it would come to a dead end, exactly as it had twenty-seven years ago. My poking around evoked little more on his part than a few subtle attempts to misdirect suspicion toward Kelly’s mother, Samantha McShane, and organizing a break-in at my house – his henchmen gave statements that he’d demanded they place the tap on my phone and get copies of my father’s file on Kelly.

“Even when Charles saw those papers, including a letter from Kelly that implied she’d been having an affair, his plan of action appeared limited to finding a fall guy on whom he could pin the murder. According to those same henchmen, their only instructions at the time involved monitoring my calls and keeping an eye on me in the hope I’d discover the identity of Kelly’s lover. Again, a careful, shrewd approach, calling for subterfuge rather than violence. And as soon as he rooted out the secret behind the mortality-morbidity reports, he had an even better scapegoat at hand in Melanie Collins. So why would a man supposedly intent on a nuanced, sophisticated strategy to conceal the truth once more resort to the clumsy art of murder?”

He glanced toward the woman sitting beside Dan. “Talk of killing, Braden’s thugs told us, came only after Charles listened in on the last phone conversation I had with Victor Feldt.” For those who didn’t know, Mark quickly outlined the events leading up to Victor’s firing and followed them through to the fateful call. “Victor couldn’t unravel all the corporate layers that we now know were Charles Braden’s doing to keep his role as CEO from becoming public knowledge. And what Victor thought he’d found – hiring and firing irregularities at companies where the executive health plans subjected employees to genetic screening – had nothing directly to do with Braden. It was Victor’s interest in the few dozen New York physicians who used the lab for their private patients that meant trouble for him. For here Victor drew perilously close to the very pieces of evidence that Braden knew would reach back over twenty-seven years and point at his baby-swapping business.

“So when Victor later left me a message, stating that he’d hacked into the computer where the results sent to those New York doctors were stored and found something peculiar, well…”

He had to stop and compose himself. “Tragically, I didn’t realize the danger he’d put himself in until it was too late. But thanks to a very special friend and colleague of Victor’s, who came forward with the files he’d entrusted to her, I finally pulled everything together.”

Dan’s dark-haired companion flushed deeply.

Mark opened a briefcase at his feet and pulled out three folders. From each he took out several lab reports that included graphs with numbered vertical spikes of varying heights along a horizontal line. “For those of you who are interested, these are the results Victor found.” He stood and spread them over the table.

Roy and a few others picked them up, studying them with puzzled expressions.

“You’re looking at genetic screening on three pairs of sisters, all with a positive family history for breast cancer. To a trained eye, differences in the DNA reveal that none of them are biological siblings – Braden’s prediction that the coming age of genomic medicine would mean a whole new level of headache for him made manifest. And over time, as more of the individuals he’d substituted underwent screening for one reason or another, there’d be increasing disclosures of nonsiblings, all involving so-called offspring whom Charles had supposedly delivered. Obviously, he couldn’t allow that to happen.”