Authors: Rex Burns
“You say they didn’t have anything in their hands when they came out?”
“One of them had a pry bar.”
“Important stuff—papers, a folder.”
“The pry bar was pretty important at the time, Bunch. But no, neither one carried anything from the office that I could see.”
He ran a finger over the fresh tool marks glinting in the steel of the safe. “Then they must have thought it was in here. They looked through everything else first, found nothing, and tried to peel the safe.”
“Maybe they weren’t looking for anything specific. Maybe they just wanted to trash the place.”
Bunch shook his head. “I don’t know. If they wanted to do that, they’d have busted up the electronics gear. I mean, all they had to do was walk in and start shoving things off the shelves. But they didn’t. They went for papers. And the safe,” he added.
It was possible. We didn’t have a thing on Billy Taylor or the bikers out at the Wilcox farm, but they didn’t know that. And like most guilty people would suspect we were after the very thing they wanted to keep secret. “Maybe they want to find out why we’re poking around their farm.”
“Yeah.” He scraped some paper together with the tip of his shoe. “Well, they didn’t find anything because we don’t have anything.”
“They found me.”
“Yeah, but nothing vital.” Bunch stood in the doorway of his closet to inventory, for the tenth time, his electronics hoard. “If the bastards had any brains, they’d have helped themselves to this stuff when they left.”
“They were in a hurry. What kind of alarm system can you rig for the office?” Like a lot of people who made their living by providing a service for others, Kirk and Associates hadn’t yet gotten around to serving themselves. Plumbers had leaky faucets at home, carpenters’ houses needed repairs, we needed an alarm system.
“Good thought. They might want another look.” He frowned and rubbed a large thumb along his jaw. “I’ll see what I can come up with.”
“Keep the cost down.”
“Yeah. You and Hally Corp.”
It gave him something to concentrate on, so I could finish cleaning up the mess. A lot of the papers were as worthless to us as they had been to the burglars, the remains of closed cases and aimless correspondence about the trivia of business life. It was about time the drawers were cleaned anyway, and as I filled another wastebasket with folded and crumpled sheets, Uncle Wyn came in and eyed the remaining litter and the glazier squeezing putty along the window frame.
“Don’t tell me, let me guess: you had a visitor.”
I explained a little of what happened, leaving out the fight scene.
“They came in the window? how the hell’d they do that?”
“Somebody threw a rock in. To warn them.”
“Ah.” He looked down at the street and sniffed. “Didn’t take much of an arm.” He poked his cane against the still-locked safe. “Bunch says they were after what’s in here.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“So what’s in here?”
“Active cases.” I changed to the singular. “Case, anyway. Tax returns. Some correspondence that shouldn’t be left around.”
“Well, I been doing some detective reading, you know? What you got to do is look for the unexpected thing. The little thing you’re not thinking about. It’s in all the books—private eye stuff, adventure stuff like this guy Clive Cussler. I like him.”
“We’re not in a book, Uncle Wyn.”
“Hey, it’s just a thought.” He rapped the safe. “But there’s some truth to it. You don’t assume, know what I mean? You look at everything, you figure the situation and the odds, you look for what the runner’s going to do.”
“We’re not in a baseball game, either.”
He gave the safe a last tap as if to say he could take a hint, and wandered into the storage room to talk with Bunch.
The glazier finished brushing up the shreds of putty and, wiping his mustache with a wrinkled and scarred forefinger, handed me the bill. I wrote the check, hoping it wouldn’t bounce, and then tidied up the last of the mess before opening the safe to stare at the small piles of documents and photographs.
The contents remained as placed in the file separators that divided the interior space. In one slot were a few letters from prominent clients that mentioned personal and sensitive issues related to earlier, now-closed cases. I went through them and destroyed as many as practicable. Beside them were the few inconclusive photos of Taylor sitting in the living room of the Wilcox farm. Nestor’s file was there too, with the photographs of Dr. Matheney’s correspondence stacked on a small shelf below the separator.
I spread the Matheney collection across my now-clean desk; it was as good a time as any to go through it in detail, and a welcome change from housecleaning. A rumble of background voices came from the storage room as Bunch explained the workings of one of his toys to Uncle Wyn, and I half listened as I read.
Most of the pages cramped onto the glossy prints related to the daily life of the clinic—reports on patients, queries to insurance companies about payment, replies to insurance companies about services provided. More interesting were those letters to professional acquaintances dealing with pending seminars or in-services. Matheney was in demand as a specialist in some aspect of transplant rejection that I couldn’t understand. Something to do with tissue bonding and phrased in technical shorthand that I would need Jerry Kagan’s help with. But I recognized that the subject fit Matheney’s expertise; he was a surgeon and immunologist, and apparently taught courses in immunology at the University Medical Center. It also explained his correspondence with the Cryogenic Biological Laboratories, another file we hadn’t had time to examine completely. That stack of photos seemed to depict mostly purchase requests for parts and equipment, and letters that carried a running dialogue about some project that Matheney was helping with. A separate file of memos rather than letters gave us half of a dialogue with something called Antibodies Research, and this, too, generally involved purchase orders on a project. Whatever it was, Matheney was on a first-name basis—“Dear Morris,” “Dear Mark”—and the memo file was apparently much less important than the meetings which started about a year ago and increased in frequency. In fact, no new additions had come in the last four months, and whatever was being established seemed to be running smoothly or else was finished. Other correspondence included two or three inquiries for assistance in locating donors of one kind or another. One letter, buried down a bit in the stack of glossies, was a copy of an urgent request from Empire State Hospital in New York to the Cryogenic Biological Laboratories. It asked for donors with blood type Rh null. A scrawled note said, “Morris—any possibilities?”
“Bunch—take a look at this!”
He came in to peer over my shoulder. Uncle Wyn limped behind.
“So all those blood tests weren’t just for Nestor’s well-being,” murmured Bunch.
“You mean they stole this guy’s blood?” asked Uncle Wyn.
Bunch shook his head.” They’d have a hard time stealing it. Probably talked him into donating a few pints.” He looked up. “Maybe it was direct transfusion. Maybe they talked Nestor into going to the recipient in New York.”
“He’s been gone a couple months now, Bunch.”
“A couple pints a week? It’s rare blood—once you get that kind of donor, maybe you don’t let him go. Just keep milking him.”
“But you’d have to have equally rare recipients. How much of that blood would they need?”
Uncle Wyn grunted in satisfaction. “So maybe you got somebody who kidnaps this kid for his blood. So maybe now you got somebody else who breaks into your office to see how much you know. What do you think of that, Dev?”
I said it was an ingenious idea, that he was right all along, and that Bunch and I would be happy to make him a partner in the firm. But he shook his head no, pleading age and arthritis, and said he was content to be an occasional consultant and wouldn’t charge us a dime for it. On the way up to Boulder and the Cryogenic Biological Laboratories, Bunch told me Uncle Wyn’s tongue was wagging like a puppy’s tail at the idea he had helped us out. “The guy’s always been a hard charger, Dev—always competitive. It must be a bitch for a guy like that to be crippled up like he is.”
“I think he’s sorry we paid off his loan. He can’t come around as much as he used to.”
“He can come around anytime, as far as I’m concerned. And he’s right about the break-in; it could have been somebody from this cryo-bio outfit.”
“He’s not as right as he’d like to be, Bunch. Think about it. Neither they nor Matheney know we went into his office and copied his files. Matheney knows we’re looking for Nestor and maybe the women. But as far as we know, he doesn’t have any reason to get uptight. And he doesn’t know what, if anything, we have. Why should he go to the risk of raiding our office when we might have nothing?” I turned the Subaru off the parkway onto Arapahoe and headed east toward a high ridge where prairie could be glimpsed through a scattering of homes, tiny farms, and light-industrial buildings. “Besides, the way those two went through the office was a warning. They were looking, yes—I grant you that. But they were also warning us off. It all points to the bikers.”
We followed the turns of one of those industrial park roads, the kind that wind like suburban lanes but are too wide and too empty of parked cars to live up to the image. A low aggregate sign sported blue letters—
CRYOGENIC BIOLOGICAL LABORATORIES
—and clean curbing led a gently rounded drive toward the visitors’ parking lot. It was a one-story cast-concrete building whose stucco facade faced the lot. The side walls were plain slabs of cement, and few windows punctured the sun-glared structure.
A very attractive woman glanced up from her typewriter as we came in: mid-twenties, red-blond hair piled up in a loose chignon, high cheekbones, and wide lavender eyes that accepted men’s admiration as only natural. Which it was.
“Is Mr. Amaro in, please?”
She corrected me. “Dr. Amaro. Do you have an appointment?”
“We told him we’d be up. He said to just come by.”
“Oh, you must be the reporters! He’s expecting you.” She pointed to a door. “Turn right—the first office on your left.”
Bunch, his camera dangling conspicuously over one shoulder and a grimy canvas bag over the other, whispered as he followed me, “You interview Amaro, Dev. I’ll interview her.”
“Photographers don’t talk, Bunch. They just take pictures.”
Dr. Amaro was a plump, olive-skinned man with a balding head and starkly black hair raked back over his skull in painted lines. He may have been in his fifties. His handshake, a brief squeeze, was cool and soft, but he was clearly excited about his business. “You’re doing a story on cryogenics and medicine?”
“Medicine and new trends in technology,” I said. “Cryogenics is one of the newer areas, I understand.”
“Well, somewhat, although it’s the more lurid uses of the field that seem to have captured the popular imagination—freezing heads for transplant in the next century, preserving the bodies of the rich. That sort of thing.”
“Do you do that here?”
“Oh goodness, no! Those kinds of things—well, I hesitate to call them the work of charlatans, because we really don’t know what science will come up with in the next hundred years. But they are in the realm of science fiction, as far as I’m concerned. No, here we deal with science reality—the application of cold temperatures to already proven medical practices.”
We settled into the interview, Bunch gliding around the background to study the doctor through his lens and occasionally click the camera, I writing with professional aplomb in a stenographer’s notebook and asking questions that would lead the doctor through a sketch of the company and its activities.
Founded in 1975, the laboratories got their start as a subcontractor in a larger Ball Brothers space project, examining the effects of radically low temperatures on various metals, plastics, and moving parts. “We pioneered some of the basic technology for the development of ultra cold environments.” With the gradual decline of space exploration, the company moved into developing technology that would apply to medical purposes. “There’s quite a demand for small, portable cooling units that can be used to transport donor parts and tissue for transplant.”
It wasn’t as simple as making a small refrigerator, even one that could maintain a constant temperature of zero degrees or one that would go down as low as minus four hundred degrees centigrade for several hours. Temperature control was just one critical aspect; preservation also required the correct oxygen tension, carbon dioxide removal, and acid-base balance. “In many cases, blood flow must be maintained even as the organ is cooled. Livers, for instance. A donor’s liver is immediately placed in cold salt solution and perfused as it’s rapidly cooled to around ten degrees centigrade. The liquid provides a blood substitute that keeps the organ functioning temporarily, and the cold inhibits tissue decay. The result is an ischemic period of up to thirty-six hours. We’re trying to improve on that.” He saw my eyebrows lift. “Ischemic? It means without blood flow. The liver can be preserved for up to thirty-six hours and—if the technology is available—be transported anywhere in the world for use.”
“What about blood? Can blood be preserved like that?”
“Oh yes. But that technology is fairly well established. We’re not doing much in that area.
“What kind of donors do you look for?”
“That’s not my field—my doctorate’s in physics, not medicine. But usually the donors are obtained through various organ recovery systems that are in contact with transplant centers across the country.”
“Do you know anyone I could interview? Any names?”
“Well, they try to avoid publicity, as a rule. It’s a delicate subject, as you might imagine. Donors’ families are often traumatized when their loved one is killed. And then to make the decision to donate organs and tissue … . Well, it’s both necessary and generous, but publicity is the last thing a transplant coordinator usually wants.”
“Just a couple names for background information. I’ll assure them and you that the subject will be treated with dignity and respect.”