There was a long silence in the room. I have to admit, the joy I’d felt at hearing the semen wasn’t Davis’s had vanished. I’d seen enough lawyers at work to know that the information we’d just received didn’t even warrant a reopening of the case, much less a retrial. My only consolation was that Frank looked as down as I was. Several days ago, he would have been grinning from ear to ear.
Kees, on the other hand, was still smiling. “I feel I ought to add at this point that that,” and he pointed at the three sheets of paper, “is not the only thing I found.”
We both looked at him, Murphy obviously peeved.
“One of the reasons all this took a little longer than I planned was that I ran the semen by a couple of extra tests. One of them came up with the fact that the depositor was taking a drug called prednisone at the time he ejaculated.
“It’s a common prescription drug, a glucocorticoid, to be exact. Pharmacists sell it for its anti-inflammatory properties to treat everything from asthma to arthritis to poison ivy. Now thon a ere is a large family of glucocorticoid drugs. Prednisone is cheaper than most of the others, but it is more potent and far likelier to cause side effects. As such, I would doubt it was administered for something minor like poison ivy; I’d guess it was more like arthritis or asthma.”
“It sounds like you’re saying the depositor was an old man in a wheelchair.”
“For the arthritis, you may be right. That is mostly found among the elderly. But asthma is something else. A lot of young and otherwise healthy people suffer from it.”
He got up from his chair and stood by the window, looking out.
“I’m also inclined to think it was either one or the other of those because they’re long-term ailments, and indications are that the depositor had been taking this medicine for four weeks or more.”
“What indications?”
He hesitated a moment. “Understand that all this gets into the speculative. I mean, I have certain scientific indices to go by, but my conclusions are really my own.”
“All right.”
“During the testing, I found both a slightly lower sperm count and a lower amount of the body’s naturally produced hydrocortisone. Now the first is no real indication of anything-tight pants can knock off sperm-but the second, taken with the first and coupled to the presence of prednisone, is a red flag for Cushing’s syndrome.”
Neither Frank nor I moved or said a word. Both of us felt that in his understated way, Robert Kees was about to make us a gift.
“I almost hate to tell you this, because it’s so thin, but I do feel I’ve let you down a little with the other stuff. But take it all with a giant grain of salt.” He cleared his throat. “If you take prednisone for a month or more, chances are you’ll start to bloat-retaining fluids you normally pass to the outside. Usually, that’s where it stops, but every once in a while-and I’m talking rarely here-you develop Cushing’s. You become weak and overweight, with a rounded, pinkish moon face; you bruise easily, suffer from occasional delirium and depression, and any psychological disorders can become exaggerated. But the most telling thing about Cushing’s, at least physically, is the emergence of a kind of buffalo hump high on the back.”
“You mean the guy’s a hunchback?” Murphy asked.
I put my hand on his forearm to quiet him.
“Now, assuming that all this fell into place, which is highly unlikely though possible, there is no way to determine how long the depositor was on the medicine, why he took it in the first place, or whether he’s still on it. Furthermore, just as the syndrome appears after a month or more, it disappears a month or less after treatment is terminated.”
Kees sat back down. “What I’m giving you here is my educated guess. Because of the low hydrocortisone level in the sample, I’d say there’s an outside chance your man did develop Cushing’s-that would make him stand out in a crowd. Furthermore, for the hundreds of people who might be issued one of the prednisone family of drugs from any given urban pharmacy, only two to fionle’s an ove will have prescriptions running for over a week to ten days.”
I glanced over to Murphy’s face. He looked back, smiled, and nodded. “Now that’s a lead.”
14
It was mid afternoon before we picked our way through the scaffolding, the workmen, and the piles of construction material outside the doorless lobby of Kees’s building. It was snowing again, as it had been almost all week. TV reports had broadcast travel advisories for that morning, and from what I could see, or couldn’t see, things were not improving.
We found the car, the only white, furry-looking, rounded lump in the now-crowded parking lot, and put our bags and the cooler in the back seat. Glancing over my shoulder as I pulled out the ice scraper, I saw the building we’d just left as the vaguest of shadows on a whited-out television screen.
“Christ, it’s really coming down,” Murphy said as he wiped the snow from the windshield with his gloved hand.
I handed him the scraper after I’d done my side. “You want to pass on going home? We could spend the night at some motel.”
He shook his head. “I’m sick of sleeping where I don’t belong-we’ve been through worse than this.” He finished clearing the windshield and opened the door, adding, “Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to give Ski Mask a little run for his money. If he is on our trail, maybe we’ll find out if he’s a flatlander or not.”
Boasts like that aside, drivers in New England handle heavy snow the same way everyone else does-they cling to the right lane and crawl. By the time I got to the interstate heading north, I knew we were in for a very long trip. Occasionally, in the straightaways, when the wind would briefly shift and open up visibility, I’d venture onto the white-crusted, slippery passing lane to overtake a couple of my more timid fellow travelers, but for the most part we were stuck in line. My eyes strained to see through the flurries to the blurry outline of the car just ahead.
“I wonder how many people go off the road because they follow the guy in front of them?”
Frank grunted. “You thinking of doing that?”
“I’ve heard of it happening.”
He didn’t respond. He was wearing a shapeless black coat and a fake-fur trooper hat with the flaps pulled down over his ears. His chin was buried in a brown scarf. He looked like a tired Russian commuter sitting on a bus.
“Why don’t you turn up the heat?”
He shook his head. “Makes me sleepy.”
“So sleep. You can take over at Hartford.”
“Naw. So what are we going to do now?”
“I say we dig into Kimberly Harris. We know damned well she wasn’t the innocent victim of a drug-crazed loner.”
“Got any guesses?”
1em" alknow damneA couple. Floyd Rubin, for instance.”
“The pharmacist?”
“He could be the father.”
“Are you kidding? I thought she just worked there.”
“He said they were friends, but it may have been more. It’s pure hunch right now, but she was five-and-a-half months pregnant when she died-and that was five months after she quit Charlie’s.”
“Does that make him Ski Mask too?”
“You’ve never seen the man. I think he’s clear there, but he could easily be her four-thousand-dollar-a-month sugar daddy. Those payments also started near the time she quit and went up to the end. I’d love to be able to look at his bank records, but I doubt we could get a warrant.”
“We could get around that, maybe.”
“Wouldn’t risk it. If it does give us something, we’d never be able to use it in court. We might wear him down-imply we’ve already got the records or something.”
“What about Ski Mask? Why not bring in some outside help?”