"I want to hear the tape," I said again.
Marino rubbed his face in his hands, his eyes bleary and bloodshot when he looked back at me. "Don't put yourself through it."
"I have to."
Reluctantly, he got up from the table and left. When he returned, he opened a plastic evidence bag that contained a microcassette recorder. He set it upright on the table, briefly rewound a portion of the tape, and depressed the Play button.
The sound of Abby's voice filled the kitchen.
"… I'm just trying to see your side of it, but that doesn't really explain why you drive around at night, stop and ask people things that you don't really need to know. Such as directions."
"Look, I already told you about the coke. You ever snorted coke?"
"No."
"Try it some time. You do a lot of off-the-wall things when you're high. You get confused and think you know where you're going. Then suddenly you're lost and have to ask directions."
"You said you're not doing coke anymore."
"Not anymore. No way. My big mistake. Never again."
"What about the items the police found in your house…? Uh…"
There was the faint chime of a doorbell.
"Yeah. Hold on."
Spurrier sounded tense.
Footsteps receded. Voices were indistinguishable in the background. I could hear Abby shifting on the couch. Then Spurrier's disbelieving voice: "Wait. You don't know what you're - " "I know exactly what I'm doing, you bastard."
It was Pat Harvey's voice, increasing in volume. "That was my daughter you took out into the woods."
"I don't know what you're - "
"Pat. Don't!"
A pause.
"Abby? Oh my God."
"Pat. Don't do it, Pat."
Abby's voice was tight with fear. She gasped as something hit the couch.
"Get away from me!" A commotion, rapid breathing, and Abby screaming, "Stop! Stop!" then what sounded like a cap gun going off.
Again and again.
Silence.
Footsteps clicked across the floor and got louder. They stopped.
"Abby?"
A pause.
"Please don't die. Abby…"
Pat Harvey's voice was quavering so badly I could barely hear it.
Marino reached for the recorder, turned if off, and slipped it back inside the plastic bag as I stared at him in shock.
On the Saturday morning of Abby's graveside service, I waited until the crowd had thinned, then walked along a footpath. beneath the shade of magnolias and oaks, dogwoods blazing fuchsia and white in the gentle spring sun.
The turnout for Abby's funeral had been small. I met several of her former Richmond colleagues and tried to comfort her parents.
Marino came. So did Mark, who hugged me tight, then left with the promise he would come by my house later in the day. I needed to talk with Benton Wesley, but first I wanted a few moments alone.
Hollywood Cemetery was Richmond's most formidable city for the dead, some forty acres of rolling hills, streams, and stands of hardwood trees north of the James River. Curving streets were paved and named, with speed limits posted, the sloping grass crowded with granite obelisks, headstones, and angels of grief, many of them more than a century old. Buried here were Presidents James Monroe and John Tyler, and Jefferson Davis, and tobacco magnate Lewis Ginter. There was a soldiers' section for the Gettysburg dead, and a family plot of low-lying lawn where Abby had been buried beside her sister, Henna.
I drew upon a break in the trees, the river below glimmering like tarnished copper, muddy from recent rains. It did not seem possible that Abby was now part of this population, a granite marker weathering passing time. I wondered if she had ever gone back to her former house, to Henna's room upstairs as she had told me she intended to do when she could find the courage.
When I heard footsteps behind me, I turned to find Wesley walking slowly in my direction.
"You wanted to talk to me, Kay?"
I nodded.
He slipped off his dark suit jacket and loosened his tie. Staring out at the river, he waited to hear what was on my mind.
"There are some new developments," I began. "I called Gordon Spurrier on Thursday."
"The brother?"
Wesley replied, looking at me curiously.
"Steven Spurrier's brother, yes. I didn't want to tell you about it until I'd looked into several other things."
"I haven't talked to him yet," he stated. "But he's on my list. Just a damn shame about the DNA results, that's still a major problem."
"That's my point. There isn't a problem with the DNA, Benton."
"I don't understand."
"During Spurrier's autopsy, I discovered a lot of old therapeutic scars, one of them from a small incision made above the middle of the collarbone that I associate with someone having trouble getting in a subclavian line," I said.
"Meaning?"
"You don't run a subclavian line unless the patient has a serious problem, trauma requiring the dumping of fluids very quickly, an infusion of drugs or blood. In other words, I knew Spurrier had a significant medical problem at some point in the past, and I began contemplating that this might have something to do with the five months he was absent from his bookstore not long after Elizabeth and Jill were murdered. There were other scars, too, over his hip and lateral buttock. Minute scars that made me suspect he'd had samples of bone marrow taken before. So I called his brother to find out about Steven's medical history."
"What did you learn?"
"Around the time he disappeared from his bookstore, Steven was treated for aplastic anemia at UVA," I said. "I've talked with his hematologist. Steven received total lymphoid irradiation, chemotheraphy. Gordon's marrow was infused into Steven, and Steven then spent time in a laminar flow room, or a bubble, as most people call it. You may recall Steven's house was like a bubble, in a sense.
Very sterile."
"Are you saying that the bone-marrow transplant changed his DNA?" Wesley asked, his face intense.
"For blood, yes. His blood cells had been totally wiped out by his aplastic anemia. He was HLA-typed for a suitable match, which turned out to be his brother, whose ABO type and even types in other blood group systems are the same."
"But Steven's and Gordon's DNA wouldn't be the same."
"No, not unless the brothers are identical twins, which, of course, they aren't," I said. "So Steven's blood type was consistent with the blood recovered from Elizabeth Mott's car. But at the level of DNA a discernible difference would have been noticed because Steven left the blood in the Volkswagen before his marrow transplant. When Steven's blood was recently taken for the suspect kit, what we were getting, in a sense, was Gordon's blood. What was actually compared with the DNA print of the old blood from the Volkswagen was not Steven's DNA, but Gordon's."
"Incredible," he said.
"I want the test run again on tissue from his brain because Steven's DNA in other cells will be the same as it was before the transplant.
Marrow produces blood cells, so if you've had a marrow transplant you take on the blood cells of the donor. But brain, spleen, sperm cells don't change."