Fatal Reaction (18 page)

“What did they turn up? Anything?”

“Couple places remember him, especially where there were gay waiters. Apparently he used to spend a lot of time at a Japanese place in his neighborhood called Kamehachi.”

“Sure,” I said, “it’s a sushi bar on Wells, just down the street from his apartment.”

“He ate there at least once a week.”

“By himself?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes with another man.”

“Always the same one?”

“It sounds that way.”

“Description?”

“Six feet tall, dark hair, brown eyes, good-looking, but not in the same league as your friend Stephen.”

“Age?”

“Between thirty and forty.”

“That’s not exactly pinning it down.”

“There’s more. According to what the waiters overheard they weren’t sure that it was all romance.”

“What do you mean?”

“The consensus was the two men must have worked together.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because all they talked about was work. The waiters said every time they overheard them they were talking about the problems the company was having with some new drug.”

Elliott was supposed to meet Joe Blades at ten-thirty. Joe had promised to show him the medical examiner’s autopsy notes and the items of evidence that had been taken from Danny’s apartment. Elliott asked if I wanted to come along. With Claudia’s words ringing in my ears I agreed to go along for the ride.

When we arrived at police headquarters a scuffed and acrid-smelling elevator carried us to the sixth floor where the special detail investigating the Sarrek murders had set up camp. We found Joe behind a government-issue metal desk, one of twenty in the open area in the middle of the room. Phones rang and keyboards clacked while the guys with rank went about their business in partitioned areas along the back wall.

Blades looked terrible. Since the last time I’d seen him his skin seemed to have become almost transparent from fatigue. At the sight of us he rose to his feet and offered up what was meant as a smile. On the wall behind him was an enormous ceiling-to-floor chart that was divided by black rules into lines. Each line was marked with the heading
Jane Doe #1
,
Jane Doe
#2, and on through the full complement of Stanley Sarrek’s sixty-three victims. Some of the lines were filled with physical descriptions— hair color, height, and weight—as well as a shorthand of what, at even the briefest glance, seemed horrific injuries. There were places for other information to be filled in: real names, addresses, next of kin. These were also blank.

No wonder Blades seemed pleased to see us. Compared to the painstaking task of filling in the details of tragedy for each of the murder victims on that wall of grief, anything having to do with Danny’s death must have seemed like a relief.

“So how’s it going?” asked Elliott as Blades led us behind a partition that had been erected to form a kind of conference area. We took seats around a chipped rectangular table of wood-grain Formica. On the portable blackboard someone had drawn a diagram in chalk. Shaped like a spider, it looked to be some kind of organizational chart.

“This whole case is a jurisdictional nightmare. I swear, if we spent half as much time following leads as we did arguing about who’s responsible for what and who’s going to get the credit, we’d know a lot more about the women in the back of Sarrek’s truck than we do now. It also doesn’t help matters any that the fucking FBI has a procedure for everything and a twelve-page form to go with it,” complained Blades. “I swear, they do twenty minutes’ worth of paperwork every time they use the john.”

“So when are you going to put this guy away already?” demanded Elliott.

“Oh, we’ll put him away. But I’ve got to tell you, I’m starting to get nostalgic for the bad old days. We could save ourselves a ton of aggravation if we just took this piece of shit in the back room and beat a confession out of him.”

“I take it he hasn’t talked.”

“Not except to ask for a lawyer. I’m telling you, this squirrel is one slick sociopath. They’ve got three separate interrogation teams going at him in shifts, including two from some crack FBI unit, and so far nothing. Nada. In the meantime we’re going through his driving log, trying to piece together where he’s been, and working with local law enforcement to see if we can’t make some identifications. The trouble is there may be sixty-three lines on that chart out there, but a lot of the bodies were dismembered, so it’s hard to know exactly how many victims there were. Just documenting what’s being done so that it can be used at trial is going to take six months. We have a family coming in later today from Wisconsin to see if they can ID their daughter. It’s a start, but even if we put a name up on that board we’ll still have sixty-two more blanks to fill in.”

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you taking the time to help us out,” I said.

“Like I was telling Elliott yesterday,” replied Blades, “I’m not sure that what happened to your friend is ever going to add up to murder, but it sure stinks to high heaven.” He opened the manila folder that lay on the table in front of him and turned to Elliott. “I made you copies of the preliminary police report and the crime-scene photos. There’s also a fax of the medical examiner’s notes and a copy of the list of items taken from the apartment and put into evidence.”

As Elliott flipped through the photos I forced myself to concentrate on the evidence list.

“What’s this about a plastic needle cover?” I asked Blades.

The detective stooped to produce a cardboard box from beneath the table. Inside were individual plastic bags containing items the police had removed and tagged as evidence. He fished out one of the smaller ones and laid it in the middle of the table. Inside was the plastic sheath for the needle of a hypodermic syringe.

“We found it under the living room couch,” he explained. “It looked to me like it must have been lying on the floor and got covered up when the couch got turned over.”

“Did you find a syringe anywhere?” I asked.

Blades shook his head.

“You’ll see in the autopsy notes the pathologist indicates the deceased had a needle puncture on his arm,” said Blades.

“Which one?” demanded Elliott.

“On the back of the left upper arm,’’.-replied the homicide detective.

“Which means that since the victim was right-handed, he could have conceivably given himself some kind of injection,” offered Elliott.

“Yeah,” replied Blades, “but why would he? You don’t shoot up drugs in the back of your arm.”

“Maybe it was something he was taking for his AIDS,” countered Elliott. “Vitamins. Anything.”

“I think all the AIDS medications he was taking were oral,” I reported. “But it can’t hurt to ask his doctor.” Elliott turned his attention to the contents of the box. Looking over his shoulder, I didn’t see much of interest: Danny’s address book, an accordion file filled with bills and receipts, all of which Elliott already had copies.

“The phone company just came through with a printout of Wohl’s phone records,” Blades said, pulling another piece of paper out of the folder. “We haven’t had time to run a check on the numbers, but I made you a copy anyway.”

I took a look at the sheet Blades slid across the table in my direction. Before Danny and Stephen left for their trip to Japan there were dozens of calls every day, but the number dwindled to a trickle while they were abroad. During the forty-eight hours preceding Danny’s death there were three calls, all on the Saturday he and Stephen arrived back from Japan. There was an incoming call at four forty-six for seventeen minutes followed by a twenty-six-second call to Stephen’s home number. Five minutes later Danny made an outgoing call that lasted just under two minutes. Besides the call to Stephen I recognized that the other numbers were all at Azor Pharmaceuticals.

As I drove to Azor Pharmaceuticals the business of the phone numbers nagged at me. While Elliott was confident that the identity of the mystery man who was in Danny’s apartment when he died would emerge from the scores of numbers that appeared earlier in the month, somehow I kept coming back to the three calls that were made the Saturday Danny returned from Japan. I was convinced they were important.

I remembered that Blades had said there was no cassette tape among the evidence the police had gathered. Presumably whoever had been with Danny when he died had taken the trouble to remove it from the answering machine and take it with him. Granted, the evidence he was attempting to conceal may have come from any one of the half-dozen short incoming calls received at Danny’s number during the ten days he was in Japan. However, I figured it was safe to assume that whoever was with Danny when he died knew him well enough to be aware of the trip to the Orient—and when he was scheduled to return. That put the focus squarely on the calls received the day immediately preceding his death.

Of course, there was also the chance of some other perfectly logical explanation for the cassette tape’s absence—perhaps it had broken before Danny had left for Japan, and he hadn’t had the chance to replace it before leaving for his trip—but then there would have been no record of calls received by his number. No, the cassette was important.

As soon as I arrived at Azor I pulled a copy of the company’s internal phone book out of Danny’s desk drawer and began looking for anything that matched the incoming calls received by Danny to the numbers I had copied from the sheet Detective Blades had shown us. It took me a while because I had only numbers and the book was arranged alphabetically according to department, lab, or employee, but eventually I found a match. The two-minute call had been made to Carl Woodruff’s office. I couldn’t find the other number, though it was clearly one of those assigned to Azor Pharmaceuticals. I checked the cover of the internal directory and noted that it had been more than six months since it had been last updated. Perhaps the number had only been recently assigned. For the hell of it I picked up the phone and dialed the number. It rang four times before the company’s internal voice-mail system picked it up.

“Hello, this is Dr. Michael Childress. I am away from my office at the moment, but if you will leave a message, I will promptly call you back.”

CHAPTER 15

What was Michael Childress to Danny Wohl? Why had the crystallographer called him at home on the day before he died? It had always struck me as odd how, with the exception of Stephen, no one at Azor seemed particularly affected by Danny’s death. I’d assumed it was because science was a closed fraternity. Now I learned that Michael Childress and Danny had had seventeen minutes’ worth of things to talk about in the last twenty-four hours of Wohl’s life. What else did they have in common?

The phone rang, jarring me from my reverie. It was Stephen, wondering whether I had forgotten about our meeting and reminding me he had yet another meeting, this one with the virology group, scheduled to begin in an hour. I grabbed a legal pad and hurried to his office. However, no sooner had we begun than we were pelted with a steady stream of interruptions—a question from Carl Woodruff, a phone call from a German enzymologist whom Stephen had been trying to get in touch with for days and whom he had high hopes of recruiting, Dave Borland stopping by to lobby for money to hire another technician. Before I knew it the virologists were knocking on the door and I was forced to contemplate the fact that the only place I was able to command Stephen’s complete attention was in bed.

I arrived back at Danny’s office feeling frustrated and discontent. I sighed and forced myself to shake it off. I decided the time had come to get all of Danny’s personal things out of the office. Not only did I need room to work, but all the reminders of Danny were too distracting. I found a couple of empty boxes in the little room beside the copy machine and used them to pack up the diplomas, photographs, coffee cups, and bottles of aspirin that those of us who are desk-bound inevitably amass. There were a couple of things I thought might conceivably hold interest for Elliott, such as a Laurie Anderson concert stagebill that was a couple of months old and a receipt from a trip to the doctor. I set those aside.

In the back of the bottom drawer of his desk I found a bottle of Bushmills, three-quarters full, lying on its side beneath the Yellow Pages. I left it in the drawer. Once we’d inked the deal with Takisawa I figured I’d drink a toast to Danny.

With my impromptu exorcism complete I felt better and was able to settle down to carefully read through the Takisawa file.

Companies have distinct personalities, just like people, and while I was trying to learn the nuts and bolts of the deal that was on the table, I was also trying to get a sense of Takisawa’s personality. The more I read, the more apparent it became that any alliance between the two companies was not going to be a natural fit, but rather a Kissingeresque marriage of convenience. Azor desperately needed money to finance its efforts with ZK-501, but Stephen was every bit as desperate to give almost! nothing away. The company had already gambled heavily to get this far and it could ill afford to concede too much to its new partner.

On the other hand, Takisawa was being asked to drop forty million dollars into the slot machine of the ZK-501 project and would almost certainly want to be sure that it not just understood the odds but would get a large enough share of any eventual jackpot to justify the risk in the unlikely event their investment paid off.

The entire discussion was complicated by the fact that what was being negotiated was the rights to something that did not yet exist and might never come to be. The oft-quoted rule of thumb was that only one of every six promising research projects ever yields a drug. Even so, most new drugs do not represent a breakthrough. Their action is not novel. They just do what an existing drug does a little differently and hopefully a little better. A new drug that does something new or works in a previously undiscovered way is very rare. When he was being honest about the odds Stephen would tell you that, at best, he was asking Takisawa to stake him to a hundred-to-one shot.