In her own way, Isabella was letting me know that she was alive and at liberty, and she was letting me know that she was pregnant.
It was with powerfully conflicting emotions that I phoned Oak Ridge detective Jim Emert. “I just got something in the mail from Isabella,” I said.
Telling him felt like the right thing to do by the simple, objective rules of law and order, but it felt miserably traitorous by a more complex inner calculus of loyalty or human compassion.
“What’d she say?” Beneath the surface calm, his voice was taut with suspense.
“Nothing. And everything.”
“Come again?”
“She didn’t say anything. But it was a very clear message.”
“Doc, any chance you could talk in plain English? I’m not so good at the riddles.”
I told him about the two cranes in the envelope and explained why I was so sure of their meaning. When Isabella had fled two months ago, her disappearance had been marked by a flock of origami cranes—a thousand paper cranes—swirling in an eddy of wind at the base of the Oak Ridge Peace Bell. The Peace Bell itself had been a key part of that earlier message. The bell had been cast in Hiroshima, Japan, as a step toward healing and reconciliation between two cities linked by a terrible destiny: one city that was created by the Bomb, another that was destroyed by it. The cranes at the bell had been Isabella’s public gesture of atonement, I’d sensed at the time, for purposely killing an atomic scientist, and also for unintentionally inflicting such grievous harm on Eddie Garcia. The pair of cranes sent to my home, which I saw as a mother bird and her baby, was a very private message. It was a confidence, one I’d just betrayed out of a sense of duty.
“Doc? Are you still there?”
“Huh? Oh, sorry.” I realized that my attention had drifted far from Emert. “What were you saying?”
“I was asking if you were careful not to contaminate the evidence.”
“Of course I wasn’t careful not to contaminate the evidence. Hell, Jim, the envelope wasn’t exactly labeled ‘Evidence.’ It wasn’t until I looked at the birds that I had any idea the letter was from Isabella.”
Just to make sure he got my point, I added, “I’m guessing twenty or thirty postal-service employees handled the evidence, too.”
“I know, I know.” He sighed. “In a TV-show world, you would have had a hunch about the handwriting or something and we could’ve opened it in a lab and gotten your buddy Bohanan to lift prints off the birds.”
“You probably still can,” I pointed out reluctantly. “I only touched the wings and the tail. I didn’t unfold any of the creases, so most of the surface area’s untouched, at least by me.”
“Good point,” he said. “We might also be able to get DNA off the flap and match it to samples we got at her house. Though by the time DNA results come back, everybody connected to the case is likely to be dead of old age.”
“What’s the waiting time for DNA results these days?”
“Long and longer,” he said. “Six months in high-priority cases. A year or more otherwise. Most of the DNA headlines these days come from cold-hit murder cases, where a prisoner’s DNA sample triggers a match with blood or semen collected and analyzed years ago.”
“What’s the point of it, Jim? We know Isabella sent it, apparently from San Francisco. What we don’t know is whether she’s still there. I’d bet not. I don’t know how she might’ve gotten there, but I’d bet she’s in Japan by now.”
CHAPTER 35
A DAY AFTER EDDIE GARCIA’S SURPRISE DEPARTUREfor Atlanta in the Paradise limo, Carmen drove down—not to retrieve him but to join him, to support him—during his evaluation by the Emory transplant team. Her mother had flown up from Bogotá to care for Tomás while Carmen and Eddie stayed in guest housing provided by the Transplant Center.