I drew upon a break in the trees, the river below glimmering like tarnished copper, muddy from recent rains. It did not seem possible that Abby was now part of this population, a granite marker weathering passing time. I wondered if she had ever gone back to her former house, to Henna’s room upstairs as she had told me she intended to do when she could find the courage.
When I heard footsteps behind me, I turned to find Wesley walking slowly in my direction.
“You wanted to talk to me, Kay?”
I nodded.
He slipped off his dark suit jacket and loosened his tie. Staring out at the river, he waited to hear what was on my mind.
“There are some new developments,” I began. “I called Gordon Spurrier on Thursday.”
“The brother?”
Wesley replied, looking at me curiously.
“Steven Spurrier’s brother, yes. I didn’t want to tell you about it until I’d looked into several other things.”
“I haven’t talked to him yet,” he stated. “But he’s on my list. Just a damn shame about the DNA results, that’s still a major problem.”
“That’s my point. There isn’t a problem with the DNA, Benton.”
“I don’t understand.”
“During Spurrier’s autopsy, I discovered a lot of old therapeutic scars, one of them from a small incision made above the middle of the collarbone that I associate with someone having trouble getting in a subclavian line,” I said.
“Meaning?”
“You don’t run a subclavian line unless the patient has a serious problem, trauma requiring the dumping of fluids very quickly, an infusion of drugs or blood. In other words, I knew Spurrier had a significant medical problem at some point in the past, and I began contemplating that this might have something to do with the five months he was absent from his bookstore not long after Elizabeth and Jill were murdered. There were other scars, too, over his hip and lateral buttock. Minute scars that made me suspect he’d had samples of bone marrow taken before. So I called his brother to find out about Steven’s medical history.”
“What did you learn?”
“Around the time he disappeared from his bookstore, Steven was treated for aplastic anemia at UVA,” I said. “I’ve talked with his hematologist. Steven received total lymphoid irradiation, chemotheraphy. Gordon’s marrow was infused into Steven, and Steven then spent time in a laminar flow room, or a bubble, as most people call it. You may recall Steven’s house was like a bubble, in a sense.
Very sterile.”
“Are you saying that the bone-marrow transplant changed his DNA?” Wesley asked, his face intense.
“For blood, yes. His blood cells had been totally wiped out by his aplastic anemia. He was HLA-typed for a suitable match, which turned out to be his brother, whose ABO type and even types in other blood group systems are the same.”
“But Steven’s and Gordon’s DNA wouldn’t be the same.”
“No, not unless the brothers are identical twins, which, of course, they aren’t,” I said. “So Steven’s blood type was consistent with the blood recovered from Elizabeth Mott’s car. But at the level of DNA a discernible difference would have been noticed because Steven left the blood in the Volkswagen before his marrow transplant. When Steven’s blood was recently taken for the suspect kit, what we were getting, in a sense, was Gordon’s blood. What was actually compared with the DNA print of the old blood from the Volkswagen was not Steven’s DNA, but Gordon’s.”
“Incredible,” he said.
“I want the test run again on tissue from his brain because Steven’s DNA in other cells will be the same as it was before the transplant.
Marrow produces blood cells, so if you’ve had a marrow transplant you take on the blood cells of the donor. But brain, spleen, sperm cells don’t change.”
“Explain aplastic anemia to me,” he said as we started walking.
“Your marrow is no longer making anything. It’s as if you’ve already been irradiated, all blood cells wiped out.”
“What causes it?”
“It’s felt to be idiopathic; nobody really knows. But possibilities are exposure to pesticides, chemicals, radiation, organic phosphates.
Significantly, benzene has been associated with aplastic anemia. Steven had worked at a printing press. Benzene is a solvent used to clean printing presses and other machinery. He was exposed to it, so his hematologist said, on a daily basis for almost a year.”