“Look, I know what you’re going through.”
Del raised a hand. “You know, I really wish people would stop saying that because, with all due respect, you don’t know what I’m going through. And you don’t know what my sister is going through. People say ‘I know.’ I used to say ‘I know.’ I used to tell people how sorry I was for their loss, but until you’ve been there . . . until you’ve been through it, you don’t know.”
He grabbed his coat, throwing it over his arm. “Thanks for the memo.”
“What would you have given to have saved your niece’s life?” McDaniel asked. “What would your sister have given?”
“Anything,” Del said without hesitation. “I would have given anything, and my sister would have too. But that isn’t going to happen. Allie isn’t coming back and that isn’t going to change.”
“No, she’s not. You paid for her rehab, and yet she died anyway.”
Del bristled. “So what are you saying—that it was a mistake?”
“Of course not. I applaud you for it. I applaud her for going. What I’m saying is that to be addicted is to be continually in search of the next fix. It becomes an all-consuming focus.”
“If we start getting rid of the dealers, start putting them away for significant sentences, and make it more and more difficult and expensive to buy the heroin, maybe those addicts at least have a chance.”
“I don’t disagree. But what do you do with the addicts in the interim?” When Del didn’t answer, McDaniel said, “There’s a proposal to create two safe injection sites here in Seattle—the first ever in this nation—to give addicts that chance.”
Del scoffed. “Yeah, I read about that. And you know what? I think it’s crap. Have somebody fill the needle for them? Shoot them up? Let them get high? How is that giving them a chance to get clean? It’s just feeding their addiction.”
“Vancouver has done it since 2003 and it has reduced public injecting and increased participation in addiction treatment.”
“So how does that solve the problem? You still have addicts.”
“Because no one died, Del, which is what you and your sister wanted most of all.”
Del felt like he’d taken a blow to the chest.
“They’ve had more than fifteen hundred overdoses, but not a single loss of life. Allie might still be alive. My son might still be alive. And if he was, at least I’d have the chance to get him into treatment.”
McDaniel looked off and exhaled. Then she crumpled her napkin and threw it on the table beside her unfinished donuts.
Del froze, uncertain what to say. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“No, you didn’t.” She grabbed her coat. “I know what you’re going through, Del. I did everything I could to convict those who supplied my son, and I succeeded. But I would have given so much more if someone had just saved him; if someone had given me just one more chance to get him clean.”
CHAPTER 6
Tracy sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair in a Spartan office at the Seattle Fertility Clinic, waiting to learn if science could do what nature apparently could not. The overhead fluorescent tubes emitted an annoying buzz and illuminated the room so brightly the white walls and linoleum floor nearly glowed. She wanted to get up and walk, to relieve her stress, but the office wasn’t much larger than one of SPD’s interrogation rooms.
She vacillated between feeling depressed, angry, frustrated, and embarrassed. She’d done everything her OB-GYN had told her to do—timed her menstrual cycle, religiously peed on plastic sticks each morning to pinpoint her ovulation, and stalked Dan like a sailor on shore leave after a year at sea. Nothing had worked.
The door to the consult room pushed open, and with it, Tracy felt her anxiety rise. She spent her days and, this month at least, her nights hunting murderers and other violent criminals, but she’d never felt as anxious as she felt at that moment. She was not in control here, and she hated feeling powerless to alter the result.
Dr. Scott Kramer entered the room in a white lab coat with his name stitched in blue over his breast pocket. He offered his customary warm smile, then paused just inside the door and pointed to the gun near Tracy’s SPD badge, both clipped to her belt. “I hope you’re going to work after this.”
She smiled. “Night shift.”
Kramer pulled over a rolling stool and sat beside a computer and keyboard on a movable workstation. Tracy smelled the faint aroma of his cologne as he angled the metal stand to allow her to see the computer screen. About to begin, he removed his hands from the keys and asked, almost as if he’d forgotten, “How are you doing?”
“I guess you’re going to tell me,” Tracy said.
Kramer nodded, his smile now just a bit less pronounced. Midfifties and bald, Kramer had soft eyes that seemed to be perpetually squinting, and a tennis player’s trim physique and tan. His physical appearance matched his mellow demeanor. “Well, the first thing to keep in mind is these tests are relative. They’re not black-and-white.”
“I understand,” she said. So the news was not good.
Kramer tapped the keyboard, talking in a soft voice. “What is relative is the decline in fertility as women age.” A graph popped up on the monitor and Kramer traced it with his index finger. “There is a gradual fertility decline in women up until about thirty-five years of age, and then a much steeper decline.” The graph looked like someone falling off a cliff. “At forty-three, you have about a thirty percent chance of getting pregnant.”
“And a higher percentage of having a miscarriage if I do,” Tracy said. She’d been reading the articles she could find online, though she knew that a little bit of Internet knowledge was almost always dangerous.
“Perhaps, about thirty-five percent,” Kramer said.
“So what do the tests show?”
Kramer had ordered several tests on the third day of Tracy’s menstrual cycle to determine her ORT, or ovarian reserve testing. He had explained that the blood tests determined how many eggs she had, and how responsive those eggs would be at ovulation.
“Frankly, your ovarian reserve is poor,” Kramer said, cutting to the chase. He folded his hands. “Now, as I previously advised, that is negative information but it is not absolute.”
“It suggests that the odds are stacked against me getting pregnant with my own eggs.” So she would not be walking in the door of their home after her shift tonight shouting to Dan that she was “locked and loaded and ready to bear.”
“The window of opportunity is definitely shorter. How long have you and your husband been trying to get pregnant?”
“After his vasectomy was reversed, about six months,” she said. Was she supposed to discuss frequency? She didn’t know.
Dr. Kramer crossed his legs and leaned forward. He had a deliberate manner that, at times like this, could be maddening. Tracy already knew from articles that six months was about the prescribed period for a couple to try to get pregnant without intervention. She and Dan had crossed that milestone.