Scott Turow - Identical

Evon moved over to stand beside him. Eventually she pointed, with a grim chuckle, to a bug that had somehow worked its way in between the two layers of glass in the double-paned window. It was some kind of beetle that had gotten flipped onto its back. With the bug unable to turn itself over, its six little legs were churning wildly.

“Talk about a design flaw,” Tim said.

“Right,” said Evon. “And humans have heartbreak.”

For a second, Tim hugged her to his side.

Hal slammed down the phone.

“There have to be plant forms that have more brains than bankers,” he declared, and directed Evon and Tim to his sofa. They took their places dutifully. She spoke.

“I know your hair is on fire with the bankers and YourHouse, so we’ll make this fast. The DNA came back early. The blood isn’t Paul’s.”

Hal gasped, winced, and dropped the pen he’d been holding.

“Damn,” he said, and repeated the word a few times. “So it is Cass’s?”

“No,” Evon said. She sat forward in a locker room posture, her elbows on her knees. It was game time for her, Tim realized. “It’s not from either of them.”

Hal’s full face went still, and his eyes flicked around under the weight of a fact neither he, nor anyone else for that matter, had imagined.

“Neither?”

Evon nodded.

“You’re saying that Paul dismissed his lawsuit to keep us from doing a test that shows that his brother and him, they’re both innocent?”

“We didn’t say they’re both innocent,” Evon answered. “That’s possible. But you still have Cass’s fingerprints, shoe-prints, the tire tracks, the sperm fraction. It’s hard to say he wasn’t there.”

“But whose blood is it?” Hal asked.

“We don’t know for sure. We had specimens from your family and Paul and Cass and it doesn’t belong to any of those people.”

“That’s it? Yavem didn’t say anything else about whose it could be? There’s no other identifying trait?”

Evon looked at Tim for a second, then faced her boss.

“He said the blood is a woman’s.”

“A woman?” Hal slammed back in his chair, his mouth wide open. “A woman? And do we have any idea who?”

“Best guess is Lidia Gianis.” She took Hal through the reasoning-the blood, the ring.

“Auntie Lidia killed my sister?”

“It’s possible,” said Evon.

“No, it’s not,” he answered. “Let me tell you something. My Aunt Lidia was strong and tough, and she was old-school enough that she’d have whacked my sister a good one if she got fresh. But banging her skull on the headboard a few times? No chance. And even if you made me believe that, there is no way she’d let her son go to prison for her. That’s the standard-issue Greek mother. She’d put a dagger in her breast for her children.”

“It’s what we have,” Evon said. “Maybe Cass and she did it together, and he pled by himself to make the best of it.”

“Why would my Aunt Lidia want to kill my sister? OK, she doesn’t want Cass hanging with Dita. How about smacking her son upside the head instead? This is ridiculous. And there’s nothing at all on Paul? Paul’s been taking his mother’s punches?”

“We don’t know, Hal. The one person against whom there’s no physical evidence of any kind is Paul.”

“Except the bullshit he told the police, covering for his brother.”

“If Lidia killed your sister by herself, then even that statement was true.”

Hal sat back again in his big leather chair and turned from both of them. He reached to his desk and tossed a pen at an empty corner of the room. Finally he revolved back, seized by a new idea.

“But there’s no physical evidence against Aunt Lidia, right? I mean nothing definitive. We don’t know for sure it’s her blood. She’s not the only person in the world who’s type B. Can we get her fingerprints?”

Evon looked at Tim. He just shrugged. He couldn’t imagine how, but there was no point saying no until he thought about it.

“OK,” Hal said. He waved his hand, letting them go.

Evon checked with Hal in an hour. His door was open. He was canted back in his chair, his hands behind his head as he stared solemnly into space. She grazed a knuckle on the door. His large eyes, surrounded by purplish flesh, briefly revolved toward her, then, after the briefest effort at a smile, he looked again to the place where the wall and ceiling met.

“I was just thinking back to when we were all kids,” Hal said. “When I used to go over to Lidia’s with Teri. A lot of the time I ended up looking after Paul and Cass. I always envied the two of them, to tell you the truth.”

This confession, not atypical of Hal when he grew reflective, alarmed Evon for a second, until she reminded herself that Hal had no reason to know how much jealousy he should have felt. Then again, there would never be any telling what part of the truth he had sensed.

“They were fifteen years younger than me, and used to follow me around like ducklings. But sometimes I’d look at them, the way they were with each other, and I was jealous. ‘They’re never alone,’ I’d think. ‘Never.’ It seemed like a wonderful thing. When I was their age, I was this fat weirdo that nobody wanted to talk to at school.” Hal smiled ruefully at the recollection of the child he was, although Evon doubted that the pain of that past was fully subdued. “And I wished I could be like them. With a twin. Somebody who’d never hate you, or look down on you, because he was just the same, somebody who’d never turn away from you. It still seems like a blessing to me. Crazy?”

Two nights ago, Evon had returned home on the bus in the midst of an unpredicted rainstorm, the drops, big as grapes, pelting down with assaultive force. Heather was in the doorway of the building, huddled under the cantilever close to the glass entry, but the overhang had not offered her much protection in the high wind. Her hair had been reduced to waterlogged strands and her hat and coat were soaked gray. As a result, it took Evon a moment, as she continued striding toward Heather in rage, to recognize what she had done. Her hair had been dyed to match Evon’s murkier shade, and she’d probably swaddled herself in bulky sweaters to make it appear she’d gained some weight. If Heather could have chopped six inches off her legs, she might have been a better copy of Evon, but the imitation was nonetheless careful. She wore a slouch hat Evon owned and that Burberry coat Evon had bought for both of them. At a distance, Evon was suddenly and irrationally afraid that Heather might even have sacrificed her looks with cosmetic surgery to create some resemblance. As Heather started forward, Evon could see that she had studied Evon’s posture and her jocky, slightly bowlegged stride. Evon was stunned but also infuriated. Did Heather think this was love? Apparently so. Or was it, as Evon suspected, the most abject confession of dependence? Perhaps Heather thought this was what Evon wanted from her, to erase herself completely. Was that love, reducing two to one?

Evon had told Heather that she was going to the police station to swear out a protection order and went at once before she could change her mind.

“I don’t know,” Evon said now in answer to Hal’s question. “It must make them crazy with each other at times.”

“Sure,” Hal said. “But they’re tight for the most part. They always were. Must be nice. Me?” he said. “I don’t even have a sister any more.”

He shook his head about that, then they both went back to work.

St. Basil’s Home for the Aged was operated by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese and had the reputation of a first-class operation, as these kinds of places went. It looked like an old school, a broad three-story structure of red brick, surrounded by precisely landscaped grounds. Whatever the irony, Lidia Gianis’s place of final residence was supported largely through the generosity of the Kronons and a few other wealthy Greek families. Over the years, Tim had had several former neighbors move in here, with no complaints from any of them, except for the obvious one, that their move out was likely to be in a casket.