“… Knowing Kelly, however, my own opinion is that she probably intended to give Melanie the chance to do the right thing by turning herself in, and hadn’t told anyone the full extent of her suspicions. If she had confided in somebody, it most likely would have been to Dr. Cam Roper, Mark’s father and her mentor. But if he’d known the whole story, wouldn’t he have acted on it after Kelly disappeared? Instead, I think she may have only asked his opinion on the files, without naming the culprit, but promising to take care of the problem before her departure. When no headlines to that effect appeared, I think Cam Roper tried to check it out himself, following the same paper trail I did and going after the original charts. Except he never got a chance to finish…”
Mark had gone very still at the mention of his dad. Ironically, he’d talked to Lucy a lot about him as he kept a vigil at her side, not sure if she could hear but driven to try and reach her. And as he talked, he eventually admitted what he hadn’t been able to face before. That in seeking justice for Kelly, he might also be tracking his father’s killer.
“… However, Melanie Collins’s suicide means we will never know for certain what happened between her and Kelly on that day.” Earl looked over at Dan. “Sheriff Evans will now outline the reason Kelly, and possibly Dr. Cam Roper, were killed.”
Dan reflexively looked toward the end of the table where Chaz remained motionless, face calm, eyes steady.
Mark couldn’t tell for sure, but Chaz seemed to give Dan a nod to proceed.
Dan nevertheless took a few seconds to scan some notes that he had in front of him. “I’ve spent the last week taking statements from the bankers, family solicitors, and tax accountants who have managed the Braden fortune for years. It seems they would rather testify under oath than be considered in cahoots with Braden Senior. I also took statements from families whose babies he delivered in his Saratoga maternity center. And have contacted at least twenty orphanages. It soon became abundantly clear that Charles Braden III did what he did for money, pure and simple.” He stopped and took a sip from a bottle of water he’d brought with him.
Mark could tell he was nervous.
“In the midfifties, stock market reversals and heavy inheritance taxes on Charles Braden’s various properties put him in a precarious financial position. I won’t go into the details of how he reversed this situation, but in short, he exchanged healthy babies for deformed ones at twenty-thousand dollars a child, for a total of three and a half million, tax free, over twenty years. In most cases only the fathers knew, and the only crime committed by them had been to forge the mothers’ names placing the babies for adoption. So far I’ve managed to turn up records of 171 children with congenital defects that Braden placed in orphanages throughout the state during that period, and I still have several more institutions to check.” He paused, and slid Mark a glance this time. “There were no smotherings. I think he created that rumor himself, to make any accusations against him seem over the top and therefore unbelievable. But as Dr. Roper will now explain, there were bodies.”
Mark jumped right in. “Some of these infants were bound to die in transport. Not many, but more than the mortality rate for healthy newborns at the time. While it would be possible to explain live deformed infants to state authorities with incomplete documents, dead ones were another matter. Those, I believe, he did bury on the grounds of the home, probably no more than three or four. Sheriff Evans found a few locals who remember him finally finishing off the lawn after shutting the place down, replacing a few truckloads of topsoil and bringing in a complete order of sod, something he never managed to do while the place was in business.”
He cast his stare the length of the table at Chaz. “So why did Charles Braden III kill in 1974? Even if his baby racket were found out, he wouldn’t have been guilty of murder at that point. And if manslaughter charges were laid against him for the few infants who perished, I doubt any court would have convicted him since those newborns might not have survived anyway. But he most certainly would have been ruined, professionally and financially, and probably gone to jail – income tax evasion figuring prominently in the charges. For that reason, he murdered Kelly, and, most likely, my father.”
The room had fallen silent.
Chaz didn’t avert his gaze, but looked desolate, as if his mind were in some private wasteland.
Mark, feeling a sudden urge to move, pushed out of his chair and started to pace. “After closing both the maternity center and the home, Charles Braden III confined himself to legitimate medicine and research, carving out a distinguished career over several decades. He also prospered in the business world. The Manhattan corporate elite who were beholden to him for healthy offspring rewarded him with appointments to their boards of directors and offered him stock options, further increasing his wealth and prestige.
“Charles realized, however, that he was still vulnerable, that his baby swapping and tax evasion could still catch up with him through something as simple as incidental blood work prior to a surgical procedure on any of the substituted children. Some of the fathers Braden conspired with have come forward and given us valuable testimony about the measures he took to prevent that from happening. Like the family accountants Sheriff Evans mentioned before, these men didn’t know they’d been in league with a murderer and were just as eager to distance themselves from him by coming clean. ‘Charles warned me that should the daughter he’d given us ever require an operation and undergo blood typing, an alert doctor with access to the rest of our family’s medical files might spot that she couldn’t be progeny of me or my wife,’ one of these men told me. ‘So he instructed me that should any serious health issue arise requiring a possible transfusion, I should let him recommend a specialist who had never cared for me or the rest of my family.’ I heard this story over and over.
“Obviously, the issue could be managed easily while these individuals were young and, odds were, healthy enough that they wouldn’t fall sick with a serious illness anyway. Once they grew old enough to leave the nest, those who moved away were no longer a problem, their medical files now far from those of siblings and parents.
“For the ones who stayed in Manhattan, Braden, under the guise of providing the best care, referred them only to doctors who had contracts with labs that were part of the Braden business empire. Why? Another of these dads explained, ‘As early as the late eighties, when DNA testing first began to have forensic and commercial applications, Charles anticipated that sooner or later genetic screening for abnormal genes might become a routine part of medicine. When that happened, he wanted to be in a position to flag and intercept any test results that reported my son wasn’t our biological offspring.’ Others told a variation of the same story, all of them painting a picture of Charles Braden being smug in the certainty that he’d taken account of all eventualities.
“So for twenty-seven years he believed that he had successfully covered up his crimes and gotten away with murder. I can only speculate as to his thoughts at the time we discovered Kelly’s body. As you may have guessed, Charles himself isn’t telling us anything. But his initial actions suggested a willingness to let the current investigation run its course. Probably he expected it would come to a dead end, exactly as it had twenty-seven years ago. My poking around evoked little more on his part than a few subtle attempts to misdirect suspicion toward Kelly’s mother, Samantha McShane, and organizing a break-in at my house – his henchmen gave statements that he’d demanded they place the tap on my phone and get copies of my father’s file on Kelly.