a gentle punch. "You see? It breaks my little police heart to say it, but this city needs people who don't carry a warrant card."
I swallowed my coffee. "You sound like Commissioner Gordon," I said acidly. "Delia, I'm not Batman and this isn't Gotham City. Maybe I could make just as much dif¬ference as a lawyer. Maybe Ruth would take me on."
Delia snorted. "Listen to yourself. You want to go from cutting the feet from under the villains to defending them? You couldn't be a criminal lawyer. It's not possible only to defend the innocent, and you know it."
"I sure as hell couldn't be a crown prosecutor either," I growled.
"I know you couldn't. It's just as impossible only to prosecute the guilty. The trouble with you, Kate, is you understand the moral ambiguity of real life. And you're lucky, because the job you do lets you exercise that. You decide who your clients will be. You decide to defend the innocent and nail the guilty. You're too moral to be a lawyer. You're a natural maverick. Exploit it, don't ignore it."
I sighed. Now I knew why Philip Marlowe didn't bother with buddies.
Chapter 23
I'd got as far as Leeds before my determination ran out. It wasn't entirely my fault. A laboratory rat would have struggled to unravel the maze of roads in the center of Leeds fast enough to take the right turning for the police admin building that housed the press officer I needed. Since I found myself inevitably heading for Skip-ton, I pulled off at Hyde Park Corner and killed some time with a decadent fruit shake in the radical chic Hepzibahz Cafe while I reviewed where I was up to on the case that stood between me and a new life.
The more I looked at Sarah Blackstone, the more I grew convinced that this murder was about the personal, not the accidental or even the professional. Sure, one of her patients might have her suspicions about the biologi¬cal co-parent of her daughter, but to confirm even that much wouldn't be easy for a lay person with no access to Sarah Blackstone's DNA and no idea where to start. And even if it were confirmed, it was still a long way from there to murder, given that her patients didn't even know her real name. Logically, if a patient had killed her, the body should have been in the Manchester clinic, not the Leeds house.
That thrust Helen Maitland into the position of front runner. I knew now that she had wanted a child but that Sarah Blackstone had refused her. God only knew why, given what she'd been doing for two of the three years since they split up. But since that separation, Helen had lost the capability to have children. If I'd learned one thing from Chris's relentless drive toward pregnancy, it was the overwhelming, obsessive power of a childless woman's desire for motherhood. Chris once described the feeling as possession. "It's there as soon as you wake up, and it's there until you go back to sleep," she'd explained. "Some nights, it even invades your dreams. Nothing mat¬ters except being pregnant. And it stops as soon as your body realizes it's pregnant. Like a weight lifting from your brain. Liberation."
If Helen Maitland had been feeling like that before her cancer was diagnosed, the arrival of a card from Jan Par-rish with a photograph of a baby girl and a lock of silky hair must have seemed a grotesque gift, cruel and gratu¬itous and, at first glance, bewildering. But when she'd examined it more closely, she couldn't have failed to see the child's undoubted resemblance to Sarah Blackstone. Helen was nobody's fool. She must have known Sarah's work was at the leading edge of human fertility treatment. Seeing a photograph of a baby who looked so like Sarah must have set her wondering what her lover had done now, especially coming so soon after the final dashing of her own hopes.
For a doctor involved in research, tenacity is as neces¬sary a virtue as it is in my job. Faced with a puzzle, Helen would not simply have shelved it any more than I would. Given her specialization in the area of cystic fibrosis, she would have routine access to DNA testing and to researchers working in the field. I knew it wasn't standard practice to obtain DNA from hair shafts-it's difficult, technically demanding, and often a waste of time because the DNA it yields is too poor in