He thought about this for a while. “How many victims were there? Total?”
“Nine deaths tied to the divorce lawyer I told you about. Six cancers that I’ve traced so far.”
“Same kind of tumor in every person?”
“That depends on how picky you are. They were all blood cancers.”
“Call me picky. Blood cancer encompasses a whole constellation of diseases, Agent Morse. There are over thirty different types of non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas alone. At least a dozen different leukemias. Were all the deaths from one type of blood cancer, at least?”
“No. Three leukemias, two lymphomas, one multiple myeloma.”
Chris shook his head. “You’re out of your mind. You really believe someone is murdering people by giving them different kinds of cancer?”
Morse looked over at him, and her eyes were as grim as any he’d ever seen.
“I know it.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Are you so sure? You’re not an oncologist.”
Chris snorted. “It doesn’t take an oncologist to realize that would be a stupid way to murder someone—even if it were possible. Even if you could somehow induce cancer in your victim, it could take years for that person to die, if they died at all. A lot of people survive leukemia now. Lymphomas, too. And people live well over five years with myeloma after bone marrow transplants. Some patients have two transplants and live ten years or more.”
“All these patients died in eighteen months or less.”
This brought him up short. “Eighteen months from diagnosis to death? All of them?”
“All but one. The myeloma patient lived twenty-three months after an autologous bone marrow transplant.”
“Aggressive cancers, then. Very aggressive.”
“Obviously.”
Morse wanted him to work this out for himself. “These people who died … they were all married to wealthy people?”
“All of them. To very wealthy people.”
“And all the surviving spouses were clients of the same divorce lawyer?”
Morse shook her head. “I never said that. I said all the surviving spouses wound up in business with the same divorce lawyer—and only after the deaths of their spouses. Big deals, mostly, one-offs that had nothing to do with the lawyer’s area of expertise.”
Chris nodded, but his mind was still on Morse’s cancer theory. “I don’t want to get into a technical argument, but even if all these patients died from leukemias, you’re talking about several different disease etiologies. And the actual carcinogenesis isn’t understood in a majority of types. Include the lymphomas, and you’re dealing with entirely different cell groups—the erythroid and B-cell malignancies—and the causes of those cancers are also unknown. The fact that your ‘blood cancers’ killed in less than eighteen months is probably their only similarity. In every other way they’re probably as different from each other as pancreatic cancer and a sarcoma. And if the best oncologists in the world don’t know what causes those cancers, who do you think could intentionally cause them to commit murder?”
“Radiation causes leukemia,” Morse said assertively. “You don’t have to be a genius to give someone cancer.”
She’s right, Chris realized. Many initial survivors of Hiroshima died of leukemia in the aftermath of the atomic bomb, as did many “survivors” of the Chernobyl disaster. Marie Curie died of leukemia caused by her radium experiments. You could cause sophisticated genetic damage with a metaphorically blunt instrument. His mind instantly jumped to the issue of access to gamma radiation. You’d have to consider physicians, dentists, veterinarians—hell, even some medical technologists had access to X-ray machines or the radioactive isotopes used for radiotherapy. Agent Morse’s theory was based on more than wild speculation. Yet the basic premise still seemed ludicrous to him.
“It’s been done before, you know,” Morse said.
“What has?”
“During the late 1930s, the Nazis experimented with ways of sterilizing large numbers of Jews without their knowledge. They asked subjects to sit at a desk and fill out some forms that would take about fifteen minutes. During that time, high-energy gamma rays were fired at their genitals from three sides. The experiment worked.”
“My God.”
“Why couldn’t someone do the same thing to an unsuspecting victim in a lawyer’s office?” Morse asked. “Or a dentist’s office?”
Chris pedaled harder but said nothing.
“You know that researchers purposely cause cancer in lab animals all the time, right?”
“Of course. They do it by injecting carcinogenic chemicals into the animals. And chemicals like that are traceable, Agent Morse. Forensically, I mean.”
She gave him a skeptical look. “In an ideal world. But you said yourself, it takes time to die from cancer. After eighteen months, all traces of the offending carcinogen could be gone. Benzene is a good example.”
Chris knit his brow in thought. “Benzene causes lung cancer, doesn’t it?”
“Also leukemia and multiple myeloma,” she informed him. “They proved that by testing factory workers with minor benzene exposure in Ohio and in China.”
She’s done her homework, he thought. Or someone has. “Have you done extensive toxicological studies in all these deaths?”
“Almost none of them.”
This stunned him. “Why not?”
“Several of the bodies were cremated before we became suspicious.”
“That’s convenient.”
“And in the other cases, we couldn’t get permission to exhume the bodies.”
“Again, why not?”
“It’s complicated.”
Chris sensed that he was being played. “I don’t buy that, Agent Morse. If the FBI wanted forensic studies, they’d get them. What about the families of these alleged victims? Did they suspect foul play? Is that how you got into this case? Or was it your sister’s accusation that started it all?”
Two big touring motorcycles swept around a long curve ahead, their lights illuminating the rain.
“The families of several victims suspected foul play from the beginning.”
“Even though their relatives died of cancer?”
“Yes. Most of the husbands we’re talking about are real bastards.”
Big surprise. “Had all of these alleged victims filed for divorce?”
“None had.”
“None? Did the husbands file, then?”
Morse looked over at him again. “Nobody filed.”
“Then what the hell happened? People consulted this lawyer but didn’t file?”
“Exactly. We think there’s probably a single consultation—maybe two visits, at most. The lawyer waits for a really wealthy client who stands to lose an enormous amount of money in his divorce. Or maybe the client stands to lose custody of his kids. But when the lawyer senses that he has a truly desperate client—a client with intense hatred for his spouse—he makes his pitch.”
“That’s an interesting scenario. Can you prove any of it?”
“Not yet. This lawyer is very