Perfect Match Read online

  They are all wearing Hazmat suits--Patrick and Evan Chao, Fisher Carrington and Quentin Brown, Frankie Martine, and the medical examiner, Vern Potter. In the black circle beyond their flashlights, an owl screams.

  Vern jumps a foot. "Holy sweet Jesus. Any minute now I keep expecting the zombies to get up from behind the tombstones. Couldn't we have done this in broad daylight?"

  "I'll take zombies over the press any day," Evan Chao mutters. "Get it over with, Vern."

  "Hokey-dokey." The medical examiner takes a crowbar and pries open Father Szyszynski's casket. The foul air that puffs from its insides has Patrick gagging. Fisher Carrington turns away and holds a handkerchief to his face mask. Quentin walks off briskly to vomit behind a tree.

  The priest does not look all that different. Half of his face is still missing. His arms lie at his sides. His skin, gray and wrinkled, has not yet decomposed. "Open wide," Vern murmurs, and he ratchets down the jaw, reaches inside, and pulls out a molar with a pair of tooth pliers.

  "Get me a couple wisdom teeth, too," Frankie says. "And hair."

  Evan nods to Patrick, calling him aside. "You believe this?" he asks.

  "Nope."

  "Maybe the bastard's just getting what he deserves."

  Patrick is stunned for a moment, until he remembers: There is no reason to believe Evan would know what Patrick knows--that Father Szyszynski was innocent. "Maybe," he manages.

  A few minutes later, Vern hands a jar and an envelope to Frankie. Quentin hurries away with her, Fisher close behind. The ME closes the casket and turns to the grave diggers. "You can put him back now," he instructs, then turns to Patrick. "On your way out?"

  "In a sec." Patrick watches Vern go, then turns to the grave, where the two big men have dropped the coffin again and are starting to shovel dirt over it again. He waits until they are finished, because he thinks someone should.

  By the time Patrick gets to the Biddeford District Court, he wonders whether Father Arthur Gwynne ever existed at all. He's driven from the graveyard, where the body was being exhumed, to the Catholic See in Portland ... where he was told by the chancellor that their records only showed Father O'Toole coming to visit Biddeford. If Father Gwynne was at the church too, it might have been a personal connection to the Biddeford chaplain that brought him there. Which, of course, is exactly what Patrick needs to confirm.

  The probate clerk hands him a copy of the priest's Last Will and Testament, which became a public record a month ago, when it was filed with the court. The document is simple to a fault. Father Szyszynski left fifty percent of his estate to his mother. And the rest to the executor of his will: Arthur Gwynne, of Belle Chasse, Louisiana.

  Enamel is the strongest material naturally found in the human body, which makes it a bitch to crack open. To this end, Frankie soaks the extracted molar in liquid nitrogen for about five minutes, because frozen, it is more likely to shatter. "Hey, Quentin," she says, grinning at the attorney, waiting impatiently. "Can you break a dollar?"

  He fishes in his pockets, but shakes his head. "Sorry."

  "No problem." She takes a buck from her wallet and floats it in the liquid nitrogen, then pulls it out, smashes it on the counter, and laughs. "I can."

  He sighs. "Is this why it takes so long to get results from the state lab?"

  "Hey, I'm letting you cut in line, aren't I?" Frankie removes the tooth from its bath and sets it in a sterile mortar and pestle. She grinds at it, pounding harder and harder, but the tooth will not crack.

  "Mortar and pestle?" Quentin asks.

  "We used to use the ME's skull saw, but we had to get a new blade every time. Plus, the cutting edge gets too hot, and denatures the DNA." She glances at him over her protective goggles. "You don't want me to screw up, do you?" Another whack, but the tooth remains intact. "Oh, for God's sake." Frankie plucks a second tooth out of the liquid nitrogen. "Come with me. I want to get this over with."

  She double-bags the tooth in Ziplocs and leads Quentin to the stairwell, all the way to the basement garage of the laboratory. "Stand back," she says, and then squats, setting the bag on the floor. Taking a hammer out of the pocket of her lab coat, Frankie begins to pound, her own jaw aching in sympathy. The tooth shatters on the fourth try, its pieces splintering into the plastic bag.

  "Now what?" Quentin asks.

  The pulp is brownish, slight ... but most definitely there. "Now," she says, "you wait."

  Quentin, who is unused to staying up in graveyards all night and then driving to the lab in Augusta, falls asleep on a bank of chairs in the lobby. When he feels a cool hand on the back of his neck, he startles awake, sitting up so quickly he is momentarily dizzy. Frankie stands before him, holding out a report. "And?" he asks.

  "The tooth pulp was chimeric."

  "English?"

  Frankie sits down beside him. "The reason we test tooth pulp is because it has blood cells in it ... but also tissue cells. For you and me and most people, the DNA in both of those cells will be the same. But if someone gets a bone marrow transplant, they're going to show a mixture of two DNA profiles in their tooth pulp. The first profile will be the DNA they were born with, and that'll be in the tissue cells. The second profile will be the DNA that came from their marrow donor, and will be in the blood cells. In this sample, the suspect's tooth pulp yielded a mixture."

  Quentin frowns at the numbers on the page. "So--"

  "So here's your proof," Frankie says. "Somebody else perved that kid."

  After Fisher calls me with the news, I go right into the bathroom and throw up. Again, and again, until there is nothing left in my stomach but the guilt. The truth is, a man was killed by my own hand, a man who deserved no punishment. What does this make me?

  I want to shower until I don't feel dirty; I want to strip off my own skin. But the horror is at the heart of me. Cut a gut feeling, watch yourself bleed to death.

  Like I watched him.

  In the hallway, I brush past Caleb, who has not been speaking to me anyway. There are no more words between us, each one has a charge on it, an ion that might attach to either him or to me and push us farther apart. In my bedroom, I kick off my shoes and crawl fully dressed under the covers. I pull them up over my head; breathe in the same cocoon. If you pass out, and there's still no air, what will happen?

  I can't get warm. This is where I will stay, because now any of my decisions may be suspect. Better to do nothing at all, than to take another risk that might change the world.

  It's an instinct, Patrick realizes--to want to hurt someone as badly as they've hurt you. There were moments in his career in the military police that his arrests became violent, blood running over his hands that felt like a balm at the time. Now, he understands that the theory can go one step further: It's an instinct to want to hurt someone as badly as they've hurt someone you care about. This is the only explanation he can offer for sitting on a 757 en route from Dallas-Fort Worth to New Orleans.

  The question isn't what he would do for Nina. "Anything," Patrick would answer, without hesitation. She had expressly warned him away from hunting down Arthur Gwynne, and all of Patrick's actions up to this point could be classified as information-seeking, but even he could not couch the truth, now: He had no reason to fly to Louisiana, if not to meet this man face-to-face.

  Even now, he cannot tell himself what is going to happen. He has spent his life guided by principle and rules--in the Navy, as a cop, as an unrequited lover. But rules only work when everyone plays by them. What happens when someone doesn't, and the fallout bleeds right into his life? What's stronger--the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

  It has been shattering for Patrick to realize that the criminal mind is not all that far away from that of a rational man. It comes down, really, to the power of a craving. Addicts will sell their own bodies for another gram of coke. Arsonists will put their own lives in danger to feel something go up in flames around them. Patrick has always believed, as an officer of the law, he