Authors: Rex Burns
Either Gilbert or her secretary had signed as Mary Martinez, and Phyllis notarized the signature to make everything nice and legal on paper.
It wasn’t much evidence to bring into court, but it was one more stitch in the fabric, and it looked as if circumstantial was the only kind of evidence we were going to get.
Bunch had been making calls to the dozen or so air ambulance firms and came up with another tidbit: “John Martinez was flown out on a chartered plane from Arapahoe Airport, Dev. Wings Ambulance Service. He was accompanied by the service’s medical flight team.”
“Was he on life support?”
“Yeah. That’s why booking remembered so easily. Said they don’t get much call for long flights with full life support, so it was a big thing. Big cost, too, but the check was good.”
“Who paid?”
“Empire State Hospital.”
“Was Antibodies involved?”
Bunch nodded. “Mark Gilbert signed the release for the funds; Dr. Morris Matheney signed the medical release.”
Matheney’s nurse told me he was on afternoon rounds at Warner Memorial and wouldn’t be back until around four. I told her I’d wait and settled down to leaf through one of the thousands of
National Geographic’s
that find their final resting place in medical offices.
“He’s going to be a little late this afternoon,” she told me once. “He just called from the hospital.”
“I’ll wait.”
The silence of the small lounge with its half-dozen chairs was broken only by the occasional rattle of the telephone and the distant buzz of voices out of sight down the hallway. It was almost five before the nurse leaned over her office’s half-door to tell me the doctor would see me now.
This time there was a definite chill in the air; he neither rose nor offered to shake hands, and the brown eyes above the Lincoln-style beard were defensive and angry. “I’ve told you before, Mr. Kirk, there’s nothing I can do to help you.”
I smiled. “But that was before you heard what I have to say.”
Matheney leaned back, his beard thrusting out a trifle more. His voice didn’t ask what it was, but his eyes did.
“When Nestor Calamaro was officially invisible, he had no existence. But then he became important to some people, and as a result he began to exist.”
“Exactly what point are you trying to make?” Matheney’s eyes, magnified by their lenses, stared at me without blinking.
“He exists on paper now. As a Mr. John Martinez. He was flown by Wings Ambulance Service to Empire State Hospital in New York. He exists on paper there as a brain-dead organ donor with—you guessed it—extremely rare Rh null blood. He exists on another piece of paper as a corpse cremated after the transplant. And he still exists in the memory of the medical team that did the transplant and who have recognized a photograph of Nestor Calamaro as John Martinez. In fact, Nestor has more existence since he was killed than when he was alive.”
The only motion in the doctor’s face was his lower lip, which curled inward so he could nip at a spur of dry flesh with his front teeth.
“Nestor still exists in your files, too, doctor.”
His head jerked to one side in a quick negative. “Not with that blood he doesn’t. The Nestor Calamaro I treated had type A blood. You can look in those files, Kirk.”
“But the Nestor who was tested at Warner Memorial, under your authorization, had Rh null blood. What are the odds of that kind of blood showing up in two people named Nestor Calamaro here in Denver?”
The teeth nipped again. “How did you—? You must have broken into my files!”
“Yeah.” I placed a photograph on his desk. “Here’s a picture I took of Nestor’s file—the one sitting in that drawer right now. If you look closely right here, you can see where someone changed the blood type.”
“That’s burglary! That’s theft—you can’t—”
“Before you get too self-righteous, doctor, please remember that the rules against obtaining evidence illegally apply only to public officials such as the police. I’m a private citizen. The evidence I have is admissible in court.” It wasn’t all that true, but—who knows?—the Supreme Court and its new conservatives could find that way.
“Why are you telling me this? Why haven’t you gone to the police with this … this story?”
“Because Nestor was murdered and I want to know who killed him. And who killed two pregnant women who have no existence at all now.”
Now the eyes only stared emptily.
“And why. Why someone with your ability and achievements would become so greedy as to feed off the lives of the helpless.”
Something hardened again in the man’s eyes—his professional competence was being challenged, his image of himself as a doctor questioned. “You think I wanted that money for myself?”
“It didn’t go to a victims’ compensation fund, did it?”
“You know nothing—nothing!”
“Tell me it was for charity. Tell me it was for the advancement of knowledge and the betterment of humankind.”
“It was! You with your comfortable ignorance—you have no idea what medical research costs, no idea what thresholds we’re on! Thresholds we can cross with just a little more effort!”
“The rats in the Antibodies laboratory? Is that your threshold?”
“Yes! Hybrid protein. If those experiments are successful, transplant surgery can become as routine and as risk-free as tonsillectomies!”
“And that makes it worth Nestor’s life?”
He didn’t hear my comment. Instead, he leaned tensely across the desk. “My God, Kirk, think what it will mean to develop a protein that kills transplant-attacking cells in human beings! Think of the benefits from eliminating the risk and the cost of all the anti-rejection drugs that we use today! The protein will not only be more powerful but selective—that’s the key. A protein that selectively attacks those T-cells which reject transplanted organs, but that doesn’t depress the patient’s general immune system!”
“Surely, doctor, there are other ways of getting funding for your research.”
“The government funded us for five years and then pulled out when we were this close. Bureaucracy! Some goddamn bureaucrat in Washington said we weren’t making satisfactory progress—as if this kind of research could be scheduled like a construction project. It’s a dead end, he said. It’s not cost effective. That was the term he used: ‘cost effective.’ He measured the human benefits against dollars and said we weren’t cost effective!”
“But you decided to be cost effective,” I said. “You took illegal immigrants and sold their bodies to fund your research.”
“We used the same criteria to make a decision that Washington used on me. I had no choice! They forced it on me—what else could I do? We’re this close to creating the protein, and to quit now—to give up all that we’ve accomplished … .” He shook his head. “That would be the criminal act—in the larger scale of things, that would be the truly criminal act.”
Behind their thick lenses, his eyes stared at me and beyond. “The wonder of it—the awe-inspiring wonder of that kind of freedom for transplanting. Think what it will mean not just for organ transplantation but cell transplants, too. Islets that can rebuild injured tissue. Even create whole and healthy tissue out of malformed births! Retarded children made normal. Alzheimer’s victims brought back to their former abilities, diabetics … epileptics … . Criminal act? No, cost effective—it was cost effective to use two or three marginal individuals for the benefit of the entire human race. Human beings are slaughtered by the hundreds every day—wars, accidents, suicides—every day all over the globe, humans are slaughtered to no purpose or benefit. Three. Three faceless, noncontributive aliens, whose benefit to humanity will far outweigh anything they could ever have achieved in life!”
“The two pregnant women, too?”
He blinked and seemed to recognize my face as someone different from the person he had been arguing with: a face of his own imagining, perhaps the face of his own conscience. Leaning back in his chair, his voice lost its excitement and sounded as flat and factual as a lab report. “They provided intact fetuses near term. Intact fetuses are almost impossible to locate, and even experiments with fetal tissue are no longer allowed. It’s insanity. Bureaucratic insanity.”
“You needed the fetuses for experiments?”
“I transplanted the fetal kidney into a recipient, using the hybrid protein in conjunction with cyclosporin A. It worked—by God, the experiment worked! And the patient would be alive and healthy today if she hadn’t contracted pneumonia. That transplant was a success!”
“The hospital knew of this operation?”
“Of course. But not of the hybrid protein,” he added.
“They knew where you got the organ?”
His hand waved irritably, as at a pesky gnat. “Antibodies Research is a clearinghouse for fetal tissue.”
“And the second fetus? You experimented with it, too?”
“I don’t know what happened there. The recipient’s entire immune system collapsed. I’ve been running various possibilities through the computer for days—weeks—and I still don’t know what happened there.” His mind drifted off to that problem.
I asked very softly, “What happened to the bodies of the women and fetuses?”
“Gilbert harvested them. To provide funding.”
It gave new meaning to the term “operating expenses.” We sat in silence. Faintly through the brick walls of the clinic came the sounds of a busy, sunlit avenue pulsing with cars and the shuffle of leather along the sidewalks. Finally, I asked, “Will you tell the police what you’ve told me?”
“The police?” Matheney sighed deeply, his shoulders weary and sagging against the curve of his padded chair. “Ah yes. The police. I don’t know. I need to think about that.”
“You’ve accomplished a lot, doctor. You’ve made tremendous advances in your experiments. But you see it can’t continue.”
The shoulders sagged even further. “A little more time. That’s all it would take—we’re so close.”
“There’s no time left. You have to make a statement to the police. I have a friend in the police who will listen to what you say. Let’s do it now—come with me, doctor. He’s a friend. He’ll listen.”
Another deep breath and his shoulders stiffened a bit. “Don’t patronize me, Kirk.” A wry twist bent the corners of his mouth. “Why don’t you arrest me? That would make a big splash in the papers for you, wouldn’t it?”
“That’s not important.” No arrest, citizen’s or otherwise, would do much good in court without a written confession first. “Come on, Dr. Matheney. He’s a detective. His name’s Kiefer—you’ll like him.”
“I will, eh? Well, I have things to do first, Kirk. The experiment—I can’t leave it the way it is. Records … data … I have to straighten things out first.” He stood, brown eyes once more soft and smiling. “Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. There’s no place I could hide anyway. I’ll meet your Detective Kiefer first thing in the morning, and he’ll know everything I’ve told you. But I must make certain the experiments are in a condition to pass on to … to whoever will take them over … .”
He pressed a button on his desk and the nurse, worried-looking but efficient, stuck her head through the doorway.
Matheney rose. “Thank you, Mr. Kirk. It’s been an extremely interesting visit. I’m sure you’ll understand that I have a tremendous number of details to attend to in a short time. Anne, show Mr. Kirk out and then please come back. I know it’s late, but I have a few things I want you to look after.”
I went out, but I didn’t go home. Instead, I sat in my car and watched the parking lot and the white Chrysler in the slot reserved for Dr. Matheney. On television, this would be the end—the detective would take the good doctor by the arm and walk him down to the nearest police station, saying, as the credits began to roll, “Come on—you’re under arrest.” But reality wasn’t like that. Reality was that arrest was an act loaded with legal freight that could weigh down the arrester in countercharges and—more important—free the arrestee because of technical violations. What it boiled down to was that I had little choice but to wait and watch, which I did until only Matheney’s car and one other remained. Finally the nurse came out, head down as she poked in her purse for her keys.
“Anne!”
She looked up, startled to hear her name.
“When will the doctor be out?”
“Why, he left half an hour ago.” She glanced at the white Le Baron and frowned. “I’m sure he left. I saw him going down the walk. But here’s his car … .”
It took us about five minutes to determine that the clinic was, in fact, empty. My guess was that Matheney had gone down the walk, out the alley gate, and over to the street to find a taxi. And then to wherever—though I had a pretty good idea where that was.
“What did he want you to do this afternoon, Anne?”
“Clear up the records. Make certain all the files were up to date. Why?”
“Is that usual?”
“Well, he’s very meticulous. But—”
“But what?”
“It’s almost as if he’s arranging to transfer the files to another physician.”
“Did he seem anxious?”
“No. Very calm. Like he always is. Why? What’s going on?”
I mumbled something about problems with his experiment at the laboratory and managed to find a phone hood and put in a call to Bunch. He was still in the office, working on equipment for our meeting with Taylor. “Metheney’s off and running.”
“Where to?”
“I’m betting to Antibodies. That’s where his research is. Bunch, he admitted using Nestor and the two women for his research. Now it looks like he’s cleaning up his caseload at his office.”
“Skipping the country?”
“If he does, so does our case.”
“Crap—I’ll see you over there, Dev.”
I angled onto Valley Highway, which was still choked with the remnants of rush hour traffic, and branched off at the Santa Fe intersection. In the flat gray light of early evening, the blank-walled brick building squatted behind its wire fence, seemingly vacant except for the four cars pulled up to the front door. I parked down the street and waited, figuring Bunch to arrive in a couple minutes, and he did. The Bronco squealed to a halt behind me, and the big man hopped out quickly and slid into the rider’s seat.