Fatal Reaction (15 page)

Rubbing his hands together, Borland explained that he was just starting to isolate another batch of ZKBR While I was eager to continue my ongoing education, I soon realized that Carl Woodruff had not been joking when he’d warned against visiting the protein lab before lunch. Indeed, it didn’t take me long to realize that after lunch wasn’t all that much better.

“What we’re doing,” Borland informed me as he continued to drop pieces of human tissue into the nitrogen with his gloved hand, “is a lot like looking for a needle in a haystack.” Beside him at the bench his dour assistant cut the sallow spleen tissue into strips with a pair of surgical scissors before passing the strips to the protein chemist. “The problem is not just that we have to isolate one specific protein among the thousands of others in the crushed guts of the spleen cells, but we have to do it in such a way that doesn’t unfold that protein from its biochemically active shape.”

Even though it was a Saturday, the scientists of the ZK-501 project worked as if it were any other day. Borland explained that he had been on a twenty-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week schedule for four months now—ever since the day he’d first set out to find a way to isolate the receptor protein.

Physically Borland was a wild man, an unrepentant hippie with a walrus mustache and a greasy ponytail. According to Stephen he’d worked his way through graduate school tending bar in Boston’s notorious tenderloin district. Once you knew that about him, it was hard to picture him doing anything else.

Now Borland’s hands were as raw as a boxer’s, chapped and cracked from the solvents used in the isolation process. He wore clogs because they were easier on his legs and he moved with the limping gait of an exhausted marathoner from the endless hours spent standing at the bench.

The lab itself was as grisly as a butcher shop. The smell of raw meat mingled with acetone seemed to fill my lungs like a viscous fluid. Under the high-pitched whine of centrifuges I could pick out the pounding beat of Nine Inch Nails from the cassette player on Borland’s desk. On the wall in front of us someone had hung a dog-eared poster that read: Life is Chemistry—Chemistry is Life. Beneath it someone had scrawled, “life sucks.”

“When I was in graduate school, this friend of mine and I used to steal frogs from the biology lab and give ’em a bath in this,” Borland said with a nod toward the container of liquid nitrogen. “After a quick dip they’d be frozen as brittle as glass. Then we’d tap them against something hard—”

“And try to make the girls scream,” Lou Remminger interrupted in her Appalachian drawl as she came up behind us. She was dressed entirely in black except for a necklace that appeared to be made of safety pins.

“I don’t know about that,” chuckled Borland, “but I bet I would have gotten your attention.”

“Pig,” replied Remminger without malice. “Have you seen Michelle Goodwin anywhere? She borrowed some slides of mine that Stephen wants me to use for the Japanese inquisition.”

“Oh stop whining about the Japanese,” chided Borland. “Takisawa won’t be any more painful than an NIH site visit and you’ve survived your share of those.”

“Yeah, but the reason I took a leave of absence from Yale was so that I wouldn’t have to suck up for money anymore.”

“I have news for you, Dr. Remminger. It’s the same in the real world as it is in the ivory tower. If you don’t pay, you can’t play.”

“Yeah, but instead of playing with my chemistry set I’m running around chasing down slides and preparing presentations,” she complained, “and now Michelle has disappeared with my slides.”

“The last time I saw her she was in the modeling room.”

“I just checked there. His royal pain in the highness was the only one in there, which is, of course, why Michelle is nowhere to be found.”

“I take it Michelle and Childress don’t get along,” I remarked.

“It’s only because Childress is such a complete dick,” offered Remminger.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” Borland chimed in. “It’s not because he is a dick, it’s because he has a dick.”

“Oh would you cool it,” Remminger shot back. “I know it makes you feel better to think so, but not every woman who won’t hop into bed with you is a lesbian.”

“You’d still better take a look in the animal labs,” said Borland. “I heard that Lisa’s dissecting beagles today. Michelle sometimes likes to go and watch.”

“You dissect dogs?” I asked, horrified.

“What do you think we try out new drugs on, hairdressers?” replied Borland, clearly enjoying himself. “They start out with rodents, and if things look good, they work their way up—you know, guinea pigs, rabbits, dogs.... I’m an animal rights activist myself,” confided Borland conspiratorially. “I think they should abolish animal testing altogether and instead just try the stuff out on crystallographers. Much more efficient.”

“What is it with you guys and crystallographers?” I demanded.

“Crystallographers have the highest PITA quotient of any scientific subspecialty,” said Remminger.

“What, pray tell, is that?” I asked.

“Pain in the ass.”

“Shall I tell her the joke about crystallographers?” Borland asked Remminger.

“Sure,” replied Remminger, pulling out the stool beside me and making herself comfortable.

“A very famous chemist dies and goes to heaven,” began Borland, “and St. Peter is showing him around. The chemist is very happy. Not only is heaven a very beautiful place with rolling hills and big, fluffy clouds, but he’s getting a chance to see his colleagues who’ve preceded him through the pearly gates. Finally, as they are finishing up the tour he tells St. Peter that there’s something bothering him. St. Peter seems very concerned. ‘Please,’ he says, ‘it’s my job to make sure you are perfectly happy. Tell me what’s on your mind.’ The chemist explains that while he’s seen any number of his old friends—chemists, physicists, biologists, even mathematicians—he hasn’t seen a single crystallographer. At that, St. Peter leads him up to the top of a tall hill from which they can see another, identical heaven populated entirely by crystallographers. ‘I don’t understand,’ says the chemist. ‘You see,’ explains St. Peter, ‘our job in heaven is to make sure everyone is perfectly happy and the only way to make the crystallographers happy is to make them think they are the only ones who can get in.’ ”

We all laughed. I decided that if I had taken a job in Katmandu it would have been less foreign than coming to work at Azor. Compared to the earthy reality of grinding spleens and autopsying dogs, lawyering seemed like little more than spinning words in the air.

Dave Borland turned his attention back to the lab bench and Lou Remminger went off to search the animal labs for Michelle Goodwin. The protein chemist began decanting the frozen pieces of spleen into a large industrial-size blender. He pushed a button, and the blender sprang to life with a high, metallic shriek. Borland switched off the machine and added purified water from a graduated cylinder, then he poured the sickly, salmon-colored broth into a large beaker.

“This is where the fun really begins,” he assured me with a piratical grin, and motioned me to follow him down the hall. We stopped in front of what looked like a large commercial meat locker. “We have two cold rooms,” he explained, yanking the long, stainless-steel handle. “One that’s kept at zero degrees Fahrenheit and one that’s kept right at thirty-four degrees. We do most of our protein work at just above freezing.”

I followed him inside. The cold room was as big as my office. Naked lightbulbs hung from the ceiling at three-foot intervals, casting harsh shadows. The walls were lined with metal racks. Against the far wall was another lab bench identical to the one we’d just left. Borland went up to it and made a notation in the lab notebook that lay open off to one side. In science, where priority, not possession, is nine-tenths of the law, the importance of documenting one’s work was ingrained in everyone who worked at Azor.

“There’s a parka over there on that hook if you want to put it on,” the protein chemist offered over his shoulder. “It’s Michelle’s, but she won’t mind if you borrow it.”

I took his suggestion and slipped it on gratefully. “What about you?” I asked. “Don’t you get cold?”

“Sure I get cold, but this protein is so tricky to work with that I don’t have time to get in and out of a coat— it’d just slow me down. Proteins, as a rule, are a bitch to work with, but this one must be the devil’s favorite.”

“Why’s that?”

“Proteins are held together with the molecular equivalent of spit. That’s what makes them so temperamental. Heat them up and they cook like eggs, rough ’em up too much and they fly apart. They’ll only do what you want if you talk to them nicely and baby them every step of the way.” Borland poured the contents of the beaker into a large centrifuge and touched the switch that sent it spinning.

“We know that ZKBP is a relatively short protein, so what we’re doing here is first spinning out some of the larger, heavier proteins. After that we filter the liquid through cheesecloth and then centrifuge it again, this time at two hundred thousand times the force of gravity. Then the clump of membranes is washed through a set of solvents, filtered again, and then centrifuged. You get the picture.”

“How many steps are there in total?”

“Twenty-seven,” replied Borland, folding his hands across his broad chest. His eyes were dark in their deep sockets and glittered like a bird’s. “I’d like to see Michael Childress freeze his pansy ass off in here.”

“What do you guys have against Childress?” I asked.

“Oh, I’ve had my belly full of Childress for a long time. He and I were both at Baxter together,” replied Borland, turning to switch off the centrifuge. “Everybody who’s ever worked with him hates him.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a self-serving, egomaniacal, preening bastard who’d stop at nothing—up to and including stabbing colleagues in the back—to get the credit. Michael’s great gift isn’t crystallography, it’s using people.” Borland spoke so bitterly that I was sure there was some personal history between the two men. “Childress has a talent for making himself look better than he really is. He’s been using the same M.O. since graduate school. He surrounds himself with ambitious young scientists who are aching to prove themselves and gets them to do all the dirty work, to endure the heartbreaking dead ends and the frustrating trial and error you go through at the beginning of any project. Then, as soon as they get close, Childress shoves the young guy aside, takes it to the obvious next step, and gathers up all the glory. I’ll guarantee you that’s what he’s got planned for Michelle Goodwin. You just wait and see. Childress has been working the same scam for years.”

“So how does he get away with it?” I asked.

“Science is a blood sport, Miss Millholland. The only thing that matters is being first. Nobody gives a shit what you did to get there.”

When I finished with Borland I went back to Stephen’s office to see whether he was free of the pharmacologists yet. I found him sitting behind his desk, his back turned to the door, apparently staring out the window at the half-empty parking lot.

“Are you okay?” I asked from the doorway. Stephen was always doing seven things at once, talking on the phone, opening his mail, punching up something on the computer... there was something almost disturbing about seeing him idle.

He swiveled his chair around to face me, his face a mask of suppressed emotion. “I just got off the phone with Julia Gordon,” he said.

Julia Gordon had been a classmate of Stephen’s in medical school. Now a forensic pathologist with the medical examiner’s office, she lived in Hyde Park with her husband, Hugh, who was a professor of hematology at U of C. Stephen had been trying to recruit him to Azor for years.

“She called to apologize about the mix-up in releasing Danny’s body yesterday. She says it’s chaos over there on account of this Sarrek thing. The pathologist who performed the autopsy on Danny isn’t even on their regular staff; he’s on loan from DuPage County.”

“So what did she have to say about cause of death?”

“Danny died from a bleeding ulcer.”

“What?”

“She says they found an ulcer that eroded into one of the major blood vessels in the stomach.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, leaning back in my chair trying to absorb this information, trying to make it fit with the mental picture of Danny’s apartment that I seemed destined to carry around with me forever. “I still don’t get it. If he was bleeding into a hole in his stomach, then wouldn’t he have died from internal bleeding? How would blood from a bleeding ulcer get all over the apartment?”

“Blood is an irritant, Kate.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“Blood is an irritant. As soon as there was a significant amount in his stomach Danny would have started vomiting it up. He wouldn’t have stopped until all the blood was gone.”

“Oh,” I said weakly, my hand involuntarily rising to cover my mouth in what no doubt looked like a cartoon of well-bred shock. I took a deep breath and tried to push down the horrific images crowding into my head. “It was almost easier to deal with the thought of him having been murdered—”

“Oh, he was murdered, all right,” Stephen cut in coldly. “There is absolutely no doubt of that.”

“What?”

“Oh, maybe it’s not murder within the legal requirements, but he was murdered nonetheless.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it, Kate. Bleeding to death is a process, not an instantaneous event. Even if the hole in the blood vessel were huge it would have probably taken between ten and fifteen minutes for him to have bled out completely. At that rate he would have still had five or six minutes on his feet before he’d start to get weak and lose motor coordination. After that he’d go into shock and lose consciousness.”

Suddenly I understood how Danny’s apartment had come to look the way it did. I saw the arcing bloodstains and felt almost physically sick.

“Danny was intelligent, physically capable, and in an apartment that contained a working telephone in a building full of people,” continued Stephen relentlessly. “Why didn’t he use the telephone to call for an ambulance? Why didn’t he run out into the hallway to get help? If medical help had gotten to him quickly enough there was a good chance they could have saved him.”