Spider Bones

He reacted as I had, though in somewhat more colorful prose. He’d talk to Hung, let me know when they had a plan.

Finally, I brought Hadley Perry up to speed.

Her surprise was delivered in hues as vivid as Lo’s. As we spoke, I also detected a note of annoyance. Because I was in and she was out of the loop on her case? Because I was with Ryan and she was not? Because the court testimony in which she was engaged was not yet finished and she would remain on the sidelines? Answering Perry’s questions, I felt a smug sense of satisfaction. Petty, but there you have it.

That night sleep refused to come. My mind kept chewing on the two recent shockers.

Harriet Lowery’s DNA was not a match for the Hemmingford floater.

Xander Lapasa might be alive.

Had Danny and I made too great a leap when comparing the antemortem and postmortem dental X-rays? The partial filling? The mandibular fractures?

Why had Nickie Lapasa gone along with my plan? What did he hope to gain from Al Lapasa’s presence in Honolulu? Did he actually believe the man was his brother?

Xander Lapasa went missing in Vietnam in 1968. Had he survived? Lived all those years as Al Lapasa? If so, why had he never contacted his family?

Or had he?

What had Xander been doing in Vietnam?

When did Al Lapasa surface in Oakland? Where was he prior to that?

What did Nickie know?

What did Nickie want?

Why did Nickie refuse to allow a DNA comparison between a Lapasa family member and JPAC’s 1968-979, presumably his brother, Xander?

Ditto for Plato Lowery. Why did he refuse to submit a sample?

Plato’s rant suggested that his wife’s death had been wrenching. Had Harriet’s illness scarred the old man so deeply it destroyed his faith in medicine and hospitals?

What had Plato said? In the end, doctors and science didn’t make one spit of difference.

I replayed Plato’s words in my mind, trying to better understand his thinking.

One comment seemed a disconnect. Those fools and their fancy test nearly cost me my family.

What fools? What test?

Cost his family? How?

Now the army comes along wanting to churn the whole mess up again.

I’d assumed the reference was to Spider’s death. If not, what mess?

I organized what little I knew about the Lowerys.

Harriet had passed away five years earlier. She’d suffered from kidney disease all her life, eventually received a transplant. Sheriff Beasley had said that neither son was the donor.

I pictured Plato clutching his album in my car. Thumping his chest so hard I flinched. My boy!

Again, on the phone today. Spider was my boy!

Both sons had offered their mother a kidney. Spider in the sixties, Tom years later.

Why could neither donate an organ?

Harriet’s twins were obviously not matches for her. Was that what had Plato so upset? Had testing turned up something the old man didn’t like?

The thought hit me like a bullet.

Paternity.

Had Plato discovered he was not the father of Harriet’s twins? Was he desperate to keep that fact hidden?

The digits on my clock said 2:18.

Rain still swished softly in the gutter overhanging my balcony.

I was twisting the notion this way and that when a scream shattered the silence.

Heart banging, I threw back the covers and shot from my bed.

Ryan was barreling up the stairs two at a time.

Katy was flying through her door.

The three of us met in the hall.

“I saw someone!” Katy’s face was adrenaline white. “Rain was coming in. I got up to close the door and there he was.”