“That’s impossible.”
“Not necessarily. I think I may have already talked to a woman who had her baby switched.”
“No way!”
“Someone who gave birth at his maternity center. Nell suggested I get in touch with her. She blew me off – thinks Charles Braden is a god – but a lot of little details add up.”
“Such as?”
“She said the baby ‘wouldn’t breathe when he came out.’ What else might have been wrong, I’ve no idea. But Braden, instead of trying to resuscitate the kid on the spot, ran from the delivery room, giving the infant mouth-to-mouth respirations, and get this, jumped in his car and supposedly raced to the hospital himself.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Except a week later he placed a healthy baby boy back in that mother’s arms.”
“And she thought it was her own?”
“From the description of what happened in the delivery room, I don’t think she or anyone else got a good look at the newborn. And Nell told me how both at the maternity center and the home, they never let the same staff work more than a few days a week. I’ll bet that was so he could ‘return’ babies when different people were on duty, and he also timed it so the mother went home the next day.”
They rode in silence again.
“I can’t believe the parents knew about the smotherings,” she said eventually.
“Neither can I.”
She remained huddled up in the corner of the cab, apparently lost in thought.
He peered into the storm, the downpour having grown so thick he was driving through white streamers.
“Do you think there’ll be too much snow once we get there?” she asked.
“Don’t know. But I doubt this will keep up. It’s too heavy to last long.”
“Why would he bury them on the grounds, and not off in the woods, someplace far from any connection to him?”
“Ever try to dig a hole in the forest floor? Around here it’s full of rocks and roots. Whenever murderers have made that mistake, even if they managed to scratch out a shallow grave for their victim’s body, animals usually dug it up. I know infants are much smaller, but hunters still might spot the remains, or someone’s pet might start bringing in the bones.”
She fell silent again, leaving him alone with his thoughts.
He’d certainly sewn up Charles Braden, all right. Taken threads of the man’s life and tied them together into a nice tight story. Even managed to get him with his own words, quoting from that odd book collection of his. Clever, and no holes. He had an answer for every question or objection Lucy could throw at him, coming up with motive, means, and opportunity.
Yet it almost seemed too neat. Other less macabre explanations were possible. Braden could have been switching babies in secret, but not killing the deformed ones. He might have been turning them over to other orphanages farther afield so the paperwork wouldn’t appear locally. That would require documents he wouldn’t have, but maybe he’d simply forged the signatures, given fictitious names for the mother, listed the father as unknown. If Braden had been switching babies, phony paperwork was much more plausible than infanticide. Yet after seeing those books he had, and hearing what he said about smotherings…
All they would need was one trace of human DNA from the soil and they would have him. But they’d have to get it clandestinely. The minute Braden suspected anyone digging soil samples, he’d have lawyers by the carload sealing up the place.
He glanced over at Lucy. She rode with her face turned away from him. He had to hand it to her, she had quite a talent with spreadsheets. Braden must have figured no one would ever notice the discrepancy with the numbers. Certainly he, Mark Roper, coroner, hadn’t, and wouldn’t be planning to head off in the middle of the night with a pick and shovel if she hadn’t pointed the way.
One thing he hadn’t shared with her, had been trying not to think of at all – the similarity in the attack on Nell and – No, he wasn’t going to even consider that. Couldn’t!
They made the rest of the trip without talking.
As they passed the pay phone near his house, she said, “Maybe you should don your coroner’s hat, phone the friendliest judge you know to get a warrant. Violating the rights of a derelict lawn shouldn’t be too much of a hurdle for American justice. If we do find anything, we’ll want to be able to use it in court.” She gave him a weak smile. “See, I’m learning. Then you and I are going to have a bowl of soup – something UN soldiers in Bosnia told me was a necessity for this kind of detail.”
He could imagine. Rule number one: Never spend a cold night digging for bodies without something hot on your stomach.
He pulled over and made a call to a semi retired judge living in a cottage nearby who had once known his father.
“Any luck?” Lucy called from the Jeep when he hung up.
“The guy agreed – promised he’d get the paperwork to me tomorrow,” he yelled back to her, holding the door to the booth open as he dialed the nursing desk for Earl’s floor at NYCH. “If anyone bothers us tonight, we’re digging for worms – Oh, hello, it’s Dr. Mark Roper. Is Dr. Garnet awake?”
“Awake! He’s a one-man, all-night vigil.”
“Plug in his phone. I want to call through. It’s urgent.”
In a matter of minutes he’d told Earl everything that had happened – the explosion, Nell, the conversation he’d had with the woman who worked at Nucleus Laboratories, and that what Victor had found seemed mostly to do with the executive health plans of big corporations. “At least that’s what upset the lady who called. Victor had also zeroed in on some genetic screening results he thought were peculiar, but she couldn’t see anything wrong with them.”
“Who were they of?”
“Siblings with a family history of cancer. They apparently were all negative.”
Earl immediately triaged the rest of the information into a series of succinct questions.
“You’ve still no idea who owns Nucleus Laboratories?”
“No.”
“Any ideas about how to track down your caller and this file she has?”
“Not yet. Haven’t had a chance to even think of it.”
“And Nell never said what she’d remembered.”
“No, chances are there never was anything to tell. She could have said that just to get a visit.”
“So we’ve got nothing.”
“Not exactly. I think my phone’s tapped.”
“What?”
“So no more calls to the house, and cell phones are out.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“And I got a pretty good idea what was going on at Braden’s maternity center and the home for unwed mothers.” He spent the next few minutes outlining the implications of the statistics his father had kept, and went on to describe his library encounter with Charles and the hall of shame.
“Mother of God!” Earl muttered at the end of the story. “That’s so monstrous it’s unbelievable.” After a few more seconds, he added, “It could have been why Kelly was murdered, if she found out.”
“Exactly.”
“Unfortunately, that expands the list of suspects,” Earl continued, still sounding incredulous. “We’d have to add Charles, and it could still be Chaz, defending his father. Hell, we might even have to think of Mrs. Charles Braden, wherever she is these days. No one’s brought her up, but I remember a rather fierce woman who, back then, certainly seemed capable of taking extreme measures against anyone who threatened her husband. But it’s astute work, Mark. Excellent, in fact.”
“Oh, it wasn’t me. Lucy figured it out-”
“Who’s Lucy?”
That’s right. Earl didn’t know about her. “The wonderful Lucy? She’s this miracle resident who’s descended into my life and become my right hand at work, who also makes great soup…”
As he heaped praise on her, giving her credit for having cracked the secret of his father’s files, he opened the doors of the booth again to let her hear. Her cheeks flushing crimson, she waved him to keep quiet from the rolled-down window on her side of the Jeep.