Fairview knew that he could be pontificating about unsubstantiated claims of imminent scientific breakthroughs from embryonic stem cell research or rattling on about how adult stem cells or even skin cells had actually been shown to be useful in a variety of cases. But who would listen to that? he thought. Show them a kid. A real live kid. How could they vote to kill a little girl with pigtails and a Band-Aid on her knee?
He pointed at the circle on the far left, filled with a scrawled happy smile. “Ellie drew this to show herself when she was adopted as a frozen embryo. She is what they call a snowflake. The couple that adopted Ellie had infertility problems. They could not conceive, so they adopted her as an embryo. She was implanted, and now we’ve got Ellie, and she’s already quite the artist.
“She drew these three pictures for me. As the Bible says, out of the mouths of babes comes great wisdom. In this first picture, Ellie is smiling because she got adopted and she got a chance to continue living her life. In the middle is another frozen embryo.” He pointed at a circle that showed not a smile, but a straight line for the mouth. “He’s sad because he’s still sitting in a frozen state. And this one on the end?”
This circle was frowning, with huge tears drawn running down the page.
“As Ellie told me, this one is saying, ‘Are you really going to kill me?’
“You see, Ellie knows that this is not just a clump of tissue. This is not just a random group of cells. This is not a hair follicle. This is Ellie. And if nurtured, she grows into this beautiful child who is in our gallery today with her mother and father.”
People craned their necks to see. The cameras pivoted. Ellie waved, just as Fairview had asked her to.
“These boys and girls are not spare parts. We absolutely can’t use federal money to kill children like Ellie.”
As the gallery burst into applause, Fairview dipped his head in acknowledgment. Today Fox News, tomorrow YouTube. And in the future? Inside, he smiled.
NORTHWEST PORTLAND
December 22
As she drove back to the office after having briefed the Converses on the total lack of progress in the hunt for their daughter, Nic’s cell phone started to buzz on her hip. She gritted her teeth. Her phone rang all the time now. It was starting to feel like a leash she could never be free of.
She lifted it to eye level. The display read LEIF LARSON. Why would he be calling her? She thought of how they had bantered in between answering hotline calls. Something about Leif slipped past her guard.
Flipping open her phone, she said, “Nicole Hedges,” sounding efficient and professional. Sounding like she hadn’t been wondering about Leif at all.
With no preamble, Leif said, “It’s Leif. Meet me over at Twenty-seventh and Vaughn. We’ve got a twenty-two-year-old guy, Michael Cray, no priors, but his stepsister is saying that on the night Katie disappeared he came home with a swollen eye and what looked like scratch marks on his chest and hands. She also says there’s dirt on the floor of the family basement—like someone’s been digging. I’m bringing in some of the ERT until we know exactly what we’ve got.”
Leif was the team leader for the FBI’s Evidence Recovery Team.
“I’m on my way,” Nic said.
Taking the next exit, she went right back on the freeway, doubling back the way she had come. The address was only a few blocks from where the Converses lived—and where Katie had disappeared. Mentally, she began to rehearse how she might break the news to the Converses that their daughter had been found buried in a basement.
There were a half dozen police cars parked in front of the old yellow Victorian house. On the lawn, a young woman with spiky yellow hair hugged herself, a cigarette in one hand. She wasn’t wearing a coat, despite the cold—just jeans, a T-shirt, and a brown cardigan sweater.
As Nic got out of the car, she heard the girl say to a cop who was writing down her words, “After I heard about Katie disappearing, I thought back to how he looked that night. And that was the nail in the coffin for me. That’s all it took. I knew then and there what he’d done.” She took a deep breath. “Because that’s the kind of person he is, see? The kind of person who would do something like that.”
Her bright blue eyes met Nic’s for an instant, but they were blank, unseeing, as if what they saw existed in some other time, some other place.
Nic flashed her badge at the cop guarding the front door. Inside, another cop gestured toward the kitchen, where an open door led to the stairs to the basement. But even before she set foot on them, she could hear people cursing downstairs. When she rounded the corner of the banister, the first person she saw was Leif. His face was twisted with disgust.
“Another waste of time. How could she think Katie was buried down here? You know what we’ve got? A concrete floor. Concrete! And as old as the house. Hundred-year-old concrete that hasn’t been touched.”
“What about the dirt?” Nic asked. “Didn’t she say there was dirt, like someone had been digging?”
“It’s potting soil! There’s even a stack of empty plastic pots in the corner. Man, I knew they would come out of the woodwork when the Converses upped the ante to a half million. I just didn’t think it would happen so fast.”