“With one twist,” Anna Borowski said. “It’s only in the blood samples of each of them that their DNA is alike.”
“What do you mean?”
“Duke’s hair, his skin cells, his saliva-even his sperm-all those tissues retain their original properties. Test any of them and they’re still unique to Duke Quillian.”
I was thinking of the skin cells from his fingers that didn’t match any of the blood extracted from the tunnel debris. Now the discrepancy was beginning to make sense.
“But his blood?” I asked.
“He had a perfect recovery from the leukemia, thanks to the bone marrow transplant from his sister.”
“And that means from that moment in time on,” I said, “that both of them-Duke and Trish Quillian-had blood with an identical DNA profile.”
42
“Just tell the lieutenant we’re in the Bronx,” I said to the detective who answered in the squad room. “We’re picking up Trish Quillian. Mike wants to go at her again, so we’ll bring her down this afternoon, if she’ll come with us.” I hung up the phone.
“I bet she has no idea what the connection was between her brother’s blood and her own DNA,” Mike said.
“You’re right. She was sixteen when they did the transplant. Not many people understood what DNA was back then. I would have thought that once the disease was cured, the patient eventually started producing his own blood again. Especially since all the rest of his DNA was intact.”
“Forget the science lesson. She’s got to know something more about Duke than she told us. And maybe it’s time for her to find out about Bex-and the pregnancy. More bones in her backyard than she ever meant to dig up. I’ve never been so happy to be spit at in my life.”
The quiet street had a series of attached houses. Once tree-lined, now there were twisted stumps and vestiges of dead trunks. Deep potholes rutted the roadway, and the cement in the sidewalks was cracked in many places.
“That’s the house,” I said, pointing ahead on the left at a small stucco building with brown shutters in sore need of a paint job.
“And there’s the detail,” Mike said, pulling over and parking in front of a gray Honda in which two detectives were sitting, in the event Brendan Quillian paid a visit.
I started to open my door to get out.
“Hold it, Coop. Slide down, keep your head out of sight if you can.”
I knew better than to ask what Mike had seen as he pulled down the visor above his head and opened the newspaper that was next to him on the front seat to screen his face.
“All clear. He’s crossing the street and getting into his car.”
When I heard the door slam and the engine start, I lifted my head. Trish Quillian was standing in the doorway, turning to take the mail from the box affixed to the side of the house.
“Who’d I miss?” I asked.
“Teddy O’Malley. I wouldn’t think by the way he runs me around those tunnels all night he’d have the strength to make a condolence call.”
43
“You got that dark green SUV?” Mike said to the detective in the driver’s seat.
“Ford Explorer. I wrote down the plate soon as he headed up the stoop.”
“Follow him.”
“I got orders to sit on the house.”
Mike passed his card to the driver and smacked the hood of the car. “And I’m giving you orders to get off your ass and follow him. I’ll take over the sister. Tail him, wherever he goes, and call me every fifteen minutes. Chapman. Homicide.”
The two cops looked at each other and drove off after O’Malley’s SUV.
“They got as much chance seeing Brendan Quillian coming to call as they do of ever seeing Jimmy Hoffa’s body again,” Mike said, flipping open his phone and asking to speak to Lieutenant Peterson.
We walked up the steps of the house and I knocked on the door while Mike made his call.
“Loo? Better find out who’s got the team sitting on the Quillian crib. I just sent them off on a chase, so I guess you’ll need to replace them,” he said, pausing to listen to a question from his boss. “O’Malley. My pal Teddy O’Malley. Can’t imagine why he’d be dropping in on Trish-especially without letting me in on it-but I told the two flatfoots to tell me what he’s up to.”
Trish Quillian answered the door in the same black polyester track suit she had worn to the station house, with an apron around her waist.
“Is this a bad time?” I asked.
“There’s no good one for seeing you two,” she said, untying the apron and balling it up.
“I’m sorry. Were you helping your mother with something to eat?”
“What do you care? She’s asleep. Let her be.”
“May we come in?”
Trish held the door tightly in place for a moment. Then she stepped back, leading us into the small parlor of the still house. She sat on an ottoman and Mike steered me to the sofa opposite it. The room looked as if it had been frozen in time, like photographs I’d seen of the 1950s-cabbage roses had faded on the fabric of the furniture, worn antimacassars covered the arms of most of the mismatched chairs, photographs of family members and a large framed picture of Pope Pius XII hung on the striped wallpaper, which was rolling up at the seams.
“You didn’t finish asking me what you need? You gonna keep interrupting my business every single day?” she said, looking back and forth between us, seeming more fearful than she had before.
“Your mother get many visitors, Trish?”
“You got more sense than that, Detective. Nobody much knows she’s alive.”
“And you?”
“A regular social club. Don’t it look it?”
I took in the family snapshots that represented happier days. Trish Quillian in her Communion dress; Mrs. Quillian with her young brood at the beach in Queens, where Brendan’s accident had occurred; Brendan and Duke-I guessed-as teenagers, posing with their father at an assortment of construction sites-subway and tunnel entrances, work yards filled with heavy equipment that towered over the kids, familiar landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge, City Hall, and the Empire State Building.
“So, Teddy O’Malley, he just happened to be in the neighborhood?”
The veins in Trish Quillian’s neck stood out like blue lines in a road map as her jaw tensed and she glared at Mike.
“You watching me now? You peeking through windows and-”
“We drove up just as Teddy walked down the steps. We’ve met him, Trish. I recognized him, is all.”
“Then you know he’s the union rep. We had business, him and me. Business to clear up about Duke. Union benefits is all it is,” she said, looking down as she twisted the ties on the apron strings.
Mike leaned his elbows on his thighs. “You gonna be all right, Trish? Do you and your mother get taken care of?”
She closed her eyes and clamped her lips together, fighting back tears as she shook her head up and down.
From the hallway, up the stairs, I could hear the soft groaning noise that I assumed was coming from Trish’s
