Perfect Match Read online

  There is a shoddy football stadium, an equally shoddy track, and a basketball court. Gideon is doing an admirable job of guarding some pansy-ass center six inches shorter than him. Quentin puts his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and watches his son steal the ball and shoot an effortless three-pointer.

  The last time his son had picked up the phone to get in touch, he'd been calling from jail, busted for possession. And although it cost Quentin plenty of snide comments about nepotism, he'd gotten Gideon's sentence transmuted to a rehab facility. That hadn't been good enough for Gideon, though, who'd wanted to be released scot-free. "You're no use as a father," he'd told Quentin. "I should have known you'd be no use as a lawyer, either."

  Now, a year later, Gideon high-fives another player and then turns around to see Quentin watching. "Shit, man," he mutters. "Time." The other kids fall to the sidelines, sucking on water bottles and shrugging off layers of clothes. Gideon approaches, arms crossed. "You come here to make me piss in some cup?"

  Shrugging, Quentin says, "No, I came to see you. To talk."

  "I got nothing to say to you."

  "That's surprising," Quentin responds, "since I have sixteen years' worth."

  "Then what's another day?" Gideon turns back toward the game. "I'm busy."

  "I'm sorry."

  The words make the boy pause. "Yeah, right," he murmurs. He storms back to the basketball court, grabbing the ball and spinning it in the air--to impress Quentin, maybe? "Let's go, let's go!" he calls, and the others rally around him. Quentin walks off. "Who was that, man?" he hears one of the boys ask Gideon. And Gideon's response, when he thinks Quentin is too far away to hear: "Some guy who needed directions."

  From the window of the doctor's office at Dana-Farber, Patrick can see the ragtag edge of Boston. Olivia Bessette, the oncologist listed on Father Szyszynski's medical reports, has turned out to be considerably younger than Patrick expected--not much older than Patrick himself. She sits with her hands folded, her curly hair pulled into a sensible bun, one rubber-soled white clog tapping lightly on the floor. "Leukemia only affects the blood cells," she explains, "and chronic myeloid leukemia tends to have an onset in patients in their forties and fifties--although I've had some cases with patients in their twenties."

  Patrick wonders how you sit on the edge of a hospital bed and tell someone they are not going to live. It is not that different, he imagines, from knocking on a door in the middle of the night and informing a parent that his son has been killed in a drunk driving accident. "What happens to the blood cells?" he asks.

  "Blood cells are all programmed to die, just like we are. They start out at a baby stage, then grow up to be a little more functional, and by the time they get spit out of the bone marrow they are adult cells. By then, white cells should be able to fight infection on your behalf, red blood cells should be able to carry oxygen, and platelets should be able to clot your blood. But if you have leukemia, your cells never mature ... and they never die. So you wind up with a proliferation of white cells that don't work, and that overrun all your other cells."

  Patrick is not really going against Nina's wishes, being here. All he's doing is clarifying what they know--not taking it a step farther. He secured this appointment on a ruse, pretending that he is working on behalf of the assistant attorney general. Mr. Brown, Patrick explained, has the burden of proof. Which means they need to be a hundred percent sure that Father Szyszynski didn't drop dead of leukemia the moment that his assailant pulled out a gun. Could Dr. Bessette, his former oncologist, offer any opinions?

  "What does a bone marrow transplant do?" Patrick asks.

  "Wonders, if it works. There are six proteins on all of our cells, human leukocyte antigens, or HLA. They help our bodies recognize you as you, and me as me. When you're looking for a bone marrow donor, you're hoping for all six of these proteins to match yours. In most cases, this means siblings, half-siblings, maybe a cousin--relatives seem to have the lowest instance of rejection."

  "Rejection?" Patrick asks.

  "Yes. In essence, you're trying to convince your body that the donor cells are actually yours, because you have the same six proteins on them. If you can't do that, your immune system will reject the bone marrow transplant, which leads to Graft Versus Host disease."

  "Like a heart transplant."

  "Exactly. Except this isn't an organ. Bone marrow is harvested from the pelvis, because it's the big bones in your body that make blood. Basically, we put the donor to sleep and then stick needles into his hips about 150 times on each side, suctioning out the early cells."

  He winces, and the doctor smiles a little. "It is painful. Being a bone marrow donor is a very selfless thing."

  Yeah, this guy was a fucking altruist, Patrick thinks.

  "Meanwhile, the patient with leukemia has been taking immunosuppressants. The week before the transplant, he's given enough chemotherapy to kill all the blood cells in his body. It's timed this way, so that his bone marrow is empty."

  "You can live like that?"

  "You're at huge risk for infection. The patient still has his own living blood cells ... he's just not making any new ones. Then he gets the donor marrow, through a simple IV. It takes about two hours, and we don't know how, but the cells manage to find their way to the bone marrow in his own body and start growing. After about a month, his bone marrow has been entirely replaced by his donor's."

  "And his blood cells would have the donor's six proteins, that HLA stuff?" Patrick asks.

  "That's right."

  "How about the donor's DNA?"

  Dr. Bessette nods. "Yes. In all respects, his blood is really someone else's. He's just fooling his body into believing it's truly his."

  Patrick leans forward. "But if it takes--if the cancer goes into remission--does the patient's body start making his own blood again?"

  "No. If it did, we'd consider it a rejection of the graft, and the leukemia would return. We want the patient to keep producing his donor's blood forever." She taps the file on her desk. "In Glen Szyszynski's case, five years after the transplant, he was given a clean bill of health. His new bone marrow was working quite well, and the chance of a recurrence of leukemia was less than ten percent." Dr. Bessette nods. "I think the prosecution can safely say that however the priest died, it wasn't of leukemia."

  Patrick smiles at her. "Guess it felt good to have a success story."

  "It always does. Father Szyszynski was lucky to have found a perfect match."

  "A perfect match?"

  "That's what we call it when a donor's HLA corresponds to all six of the patient's HLA."

  Patrick takes a quick breath. "Especially when they're not related."

  "Oh," Dr. Bessette says. "But that wasn't the case here. Father Szyszynski and his donor were half-brothers."

  Francesca Martine came to the Maine State Lab by way of New Hampshire, where she'd been working as a DNA scientist until something better came along. That something turned out not to be the ballistics expert who broke her heart. She moved north, nursing her wounds, and discovered what she'd always known--safety came in gels and Petri dishes, and numbers never hurt you.

  That said, numbers also couldn't explain the visceral reaction she has the minute she first meets Quentin Brown. On the phone, she imagined him like all the other state drones--harried and underpaid, with skin a sickly shade of gray. But from the moment he walks into her lab, she cannot take her eyes off him. He is striking, certainly, with his excessive height and his mahogany complexion, but Frankie knows that isn't the attraction. She feels a pull between them, magnetism honed by the common experience of being different. She is not black, but she's often been the only woman in the room with an IQ of 220.

  Unfortunately, if she wants Quentin Brown to study her closely, she'll have to assume the shape of a forensic lab report. "What was it that made you look at this twice?" Frankie asks.

  He narrows his eyes. "How come you're asking?"

  "Curiosity. It's pretty esote