She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,46

to be vacant, looked like a squatting situation. Two adults were found downstairs, both dead, both shot. These three men were found in a bedroom on the second floor. Their bodies match all our others. The investigating officer wrote it up as a B&E that went sideways.”

He slid the folder across the desk to her. “Read it. We’ve got time. I’ve got someplace to be.”

“Where?”

“I’m gonna stick to the Bellino kid all day.”

“Seriously? The Flack murder was five years ago. At best, he stumbled into it.”

“It’s all I’ve got.” He pulled his car keys from his pocket and tapped at the folder. “Read. I want to know what you think it all means.”

“What part?”

“You’ll see. It’s different.”

A few other detectives had arrived while they were talking. As he started out of the room, they turned away from him, from the board, murmured to each other. The Wall of Weird was out. Today would be an interesting day.

2

Oddly, the cancer didn’t start in Auntie Jo’s lungs, but in her blood. I couldn’t remember a day when Auntie Jo wasn’t tired, but in the spring of 1992, she got really tired. She’d come home from one of her shifts at the diner and collapse into her chair and sometimes didn’t get back up until morning. She lost her appetite, and I noticed that the random bumps and bruises inherent to waiting tables stopped fading from her arms, instead becoming dark, this nasty shade of purple, lingering for weeks. Then the random fevers started. I convinced her to go to the clinic in April, and a blood draw revealed a high count of white blood cells.

The doctor at the clinic referred her to another doctor, and in turn, she referred us to a specialist with offices near West Penn Hospital. Dr. Pavia called the extra white blood cells blasts and said they weren’t fully developed. Unlike normal white blood cells, these blasts could not fight off infection. They originated in her bone marrow.

My Auntie Jo had leukemia.

Acute myeloid leukemia, he called it.

He was quick to point out her smoking was probably a contributing factor but not the sole cause. He advised her to quit anyway. She said she would, but she lit up a cigarette the minute we left his office, and I had yet to see her cut back from her current pack-a-day habit.

There was talk of a bone marrow transplant. Dr. Pavia scheduled her for chemotherapy and radiation treatment all while nodding in response to Auntie Jo’s complaints of time, money, and the lack of both. She didn’t have insurance or healthcare, and this bit of news would not make obtaining either of them any easier. He’d heard these things before. I got the impression he heard them a couple times each day, because his answers were clear, concise, and well rehearsed. Cancer ran a tight ship. There was no convenient time to pencil it in, nor could treatment be put off. Valuable time had already been lost.

Auntie Jo asked the doctor how long she had.

He spread his hands, palms up—a couple months, five years, longer, hard to say. Another practiced answer to the most common of questions.

Although I insisted she rest, Auntie Jo worked through the first week of treatment. She even squeezed in a few doubles in an attempt to bring in extra money, but by the second week she began cutting shifts, by the third the vomiting and lack of energy kept her confined to our apartment.

About that time, the bills started. First the clinic, then the doctor, then the specialist, then treatment, followed by more treatment. We also had rent, utilities, food. The monthly envelopes containing cash continued to arrive on the eighth of every month, and I saved most of it. $34,108 on the day Auntie Jo was diagnosed, (I counted the moment we got home from Dr. Pavia’s office) but now, I found myself down at the corner store buying money orders on an almost daily basis—nearly ten thousand spent in the past few months, with no end in sight.

I didn’t let Auntie Jo see the bills. I most definitely didn’t let her see the payments—both would cause worry, and there was enough of that. She had been home, either in her chair or in bed, when the last two envelopes appeared in their usual spot at the center of my bed, but when I got home on both of those nights after my shift at the diner, she said nothing of an intruder. She