Bad Blood

Guy Young

Description

The shocking, simultaneous discovery of two dead bodies on two continents, both still bleeding after their lifeless bodies are found, leaves the police dumbfounded. Is it some horrific disease or something more sinister? Enlisted to assist law enforcement, Dr. Andy Friedman and Dr. Leila Baker attempt to unravel the mystery. From Los Angeles to New York to Switzerland, Norway, and Scotland, they chase many, seemingly unrelated clues and learn about other horrors beyond those of the dead bodies.

During the fast-paced, global chase to solve the mystery, Andy and Leila discover as much about themselves and each other as they do about the circumstances of the mysterious deaths. They also confront issues of religious and ethnic tolerance that arise unexpectedly. Their journey is not only an unearthing of clues, but a self-discovery ultimately culminating in both of them wrestling with an unimaginable moral dilemma.

Sujets

• Bad Blood

Informations

• Publié par: Toplink Publishing, LLC
• Date de parution: 10 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781950256044
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Bad Blood
Guy Young


Copyright © 2019 by Guy Young.
Paperback: 978-1-950256-03-7
eBook: 978-1-950256-04-4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
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Printed in the United States of America


Contents
Prol ogue
Chapt er 1
Chapt er 2
Chapt er 3
Chapt er 4
Chapt er 5
Chapt er 6
Chapt er 7
Chapt er 8
Chapt er 9
Chapte r 10
Chapte r 11
Chapte r 12
Chapte r 13
Chapte r 14
Chapte r 15
Chapte r 16
Chapte r 17
Chapte r 18
Chapte r 19
Chapte r 20
Chapte r 21
Chapte r 22
Chapte r 23
Chapte r 24
Chapte r 25
Chapte r 26
Chapte r 27
Chapte r 28
Chapte r 29
Chapte r 30
Chapte r 31
Chapte r 32
Chapte r 33
Chapte r 34
Chapte r 35
Chapte r 36
Chapte r 37
Chapte r 38
Chapte r 39
About The Au thor


Prologue
S he died. She didn’t need to die. She shouldn’t have died, but she did. Her mother collapsed to the ground in shock. Her father, tears welled up in his eyes like a cup filled to the brim, dropped to the floor to console his wife. Her older brother cupped his hands over his face, perhaps too embarrassed to let the strangers in the room see him weeping like a baby, while her younger sister just stared straight ahead, mouth slightly agape, not able to fully comprehend what had transpired. The strangers in the room were the medical staff: nurses, doctors, social workers. They were all there to support the family, yet what could they do? The doctors had done what they could to save her, but they can’t save everyone. It was the most helpless feeling a health-care provider could ever have. The chaplain was there too, but the arrival of the chaplain to a hospital room is rarely a welcome sight, and this case was no different. The chaplain’s arriv al, like that of vultures, meant death was nearby. His role now was to console and to aid in initiating the gut-wrenching grieving pro cess.
She had doctors who were among the best specialists in the world working in one of the best hospitals in the world. They had the knowledge required, the supporting staff of nurses and other health-care professionals, and particularly, in this case, a family that did everything they could to care for their beloved. But she still died. How could this happen? How could this happen in a nation of such wealth and prosperity? Sometimes there are no explanations. Sometimes, we must simply accept that we and our loved ones are mortal and that to all their day will come. However, one never expects to have to bury a child—not ever and especially not as the child is just beginning to blossom into adulthood. Parents should never have to bury their child, but our health and the health of our loved ones is not entirely in our con trol.
Still, she shouldn’t have died. Her doctors had the knowledge and experience but did not have all the tools at their disposal. It was like a firefighter arriving to the scene of a house ablaze with his brigade, his trucks, his axes, and ladders, only to find there is no water anywhere. In the case of the girl who died, it wasn’t quite so random. Her doctors were soldiers with the best strategy yet without the best weapons. It shouldn’t have been this way. She really shouldn’t have died. But she did.


Chapter 1
Novembe r 22
New York City
A lthough Thanksgiving was just around the corner, Manhattan was bathed in the unexpected warm sunshine of Indian summer. With a temperature around sixty-five degrees, Central Park was full of people enjoying what would likely be the last warm day for many months. Under the specter of climate change, the winters were colder and snowier than ever, and the summers were hotter, a combination that often wreaked havoc across the United States, and felt acutely in the largest city in the country. There had been many cases of children and spouses waiting additional days for their loved ones to return home from business trips, ruining many well-planned vacations. For all of man’s ingenious inventions, it takes but a few inches of snow on the tarmacs, streets, and driveways to halt humanity’s comings and goings as if they were a colony of marching ants frozen in time.
Could this Indian summer day be the harbinger of a warmer winter to come? Detective Sean O’Reilly pondered just that as he was sitting outside Foley’s Irish Pub on Thirty-Third Street in the shadow of the Empire State Building. Although he hated the cold, snowy weather, it had one odd bonus—a lower crime rate. It seemed even the activities of criminals bowed to harsh weather. The weathermen were predicting a warmer than usual winter, but O’Reilly knew better than to believe them. How wrong they were—and so many times , he thought. If only he had a job where being wrong with infinite regularity was accepted, he would entertain far fewer of the commissioner of police’s rants. The irony that meteorology was a science and detective work an art was not lost on him. The early-afternoon crowd at Foley’s was a mixture of off-duty firefighters in jeans and T-shirts enjoying a late afternoon Guinness and well-dressed young men in suits and loosened ties drinking scotch on the rocks, McCallan or the like, and probably discussing their business dealings. Foley’s had a very long, beautiful dark-wood bar on one side and cocktail tables lining the opposite wall.
The walls were painted black and hung with pictures of the motherland, Ireland: Trinity College and Grafton Street in Dublin, the Connemara coastline, and others. O’Reilly recognized the iconic Cliffs of Moher on the picture just above his t able.
As he sat sipping his club soda and lemon—no alcohol was allowed while on duty—he wondered how his Irish ancestors had lived. He’d been told by his father that they had left during the horrendous potato famine, which peaked in 1847, and his family has remained in New York ever since. O’Reilly had grown up in a typical, blue-collar Irish American family in Queens, just over the bridge from Manhattan. His parents were caring and loving but also taskmasters when it came to school and homework. After all, his dad, a policeman for thirty years in the New York Police Department, and his mother, a public-school teacher, expected their children to achieve even loftier careers, if not equally noble ones, and while they were proud of their professions, they also realized that in the current culture of America they were both undervalued and underpaid. O’Reilly was a good son and took great pride in his parents’ jobs, often reminding them that they had two of the most noble professions one could find. He had been fourteen years old when his grades first started to falter. His parents had sat him down and recounted in great detail how his great-grandfather had come to New York during the great Irish wave of immigration in the latter half of the nineteenth century. They’d gone on to explain how each successive generation had had better jobs, longer careers, and more money, and that he and his two sisters were expected to do the same.
While his sisters did achieve his parents’ dreams, O’Reilly truly wanted to work in law enforcement, and though he went to great lengths to convince his parents of this, they surmised that he simply did not have the determination it took to finish college and go to a professional school. His oldest sister, Mary, was a lawyer working for Cravath, one of the most prestigious law firms in the world. His other sister, Kelly, had toiled through medical school for four years and was now a celebrated obstetrician with a million-dollar practice on Fifth Avenue, catering to the wealthy and donating twenty percent of her time to the poor who could not dream of affording her high-end services. She was one of the only physicians in New York who still paid house c alls.
O’Reilly’s grades eventually improved, but he was always fascinated by the crime-drama television shows of his teenage years— Law & Order was his favorite—and he was enthralled by the role the detectives played. He would dream he was Jerry Orbach playing Detective Lenny Briscoe and solving the crime. He was convinced, or at least he convinced himself, that the lawyers had it too easy, what with the detectives essentially handing them a slam-dunk case each time. Of course, that wasn’t always true, neither on the show nor in real life, he would learn years later. Although his parents were disappointed at first, his father eventually reconciled himself with the fact that his only son, Sean, was not a beat cop but a detective, and eventually he grew proud that his son had indeed surpassed his achievements, as he had always h oped.
Sitting outside Foley’s and sipping his club soda with his partner, Detective Jose Alvarez, he couldn’t help but feel happy today—that is what Indian summer does. He had been partnered for nearly two years now with Detective Alvarez, who at thirty years of age was fifteen years his junior. Over the past two years, O’Reill