Fatal Reaction (36 page)

“What am I supposed to tell them?” he protested.

“Tell them it’s Dr. Azorini’s orders. It shouldn’t be for very long. Just until the police come.”

“The police?” Bill demanded, alarm creeping into his voice. I was secretly amused to see his tough-guy act begin to evaporate at the merest hint of actual trouble.

“It’s just a precaution. But first we’ve got to find out who’s been playing these tricks with Dr. Childress’s ID.”

Quickly I made my way back to my office and rooted in the drawer for Detective Rankin’s card, the one he’d given me with his number on it. Whoever answered the phone informed me that Detective Rankin was unavailable. When I asked about Detective Masterson he told me that he was out on a call. Then I called Elliott and left a message with his answering service. I thought about what I had said to Paramilitary Bill about summoning the police, but now with the phone in my hand I found I had no one else to call. While I thought I had a good chance of being able to explain to one of the detectives assigned to investigate Childress’s murder my fears about his killer being in the building, the prospect of making the same point to the police dispatcher seemed hideously impractical.

And yet there was someone in the building who had used Michael Childress’s ID to get into the building that morning. The only trouble was that I had no way of knowing who that person might be. Briefly, I considered setting off the fire alarm just to see who left the building, but I knew it was hooked up to a halon system that automatically dumped fire-retardant gas throughout the building. Halon puts out fires much more quickly than water does, but it is also much more expensive. Stephen complained that every false alarm cost him fifteen thousand dollars, but with so many valuable experiments underway in the building the halon system was essential.

I figured it couldn’t hurt to take a walk through the building. Even though I had no way of knowing whether my suspicions were correct, my curiosity would not allow me to sit still.

I took the service stairs to the basement and found myself wondering whether it was really true that the only way out of the building was through the front door even at this time of night. What about the men from the biohazard company? Surely they came in and out through the loading dock with their containers. How did they get in and out? And what about on Friday when everyone was frantically working to get the building ready for the electricity to be cut off? The door to the loading dock had been open most of the afternoon as tracks had come to pick up animals and the freezer unit was delivered. No doubt there would have been ample opportunity for someone to have slipped in or out unobserved. That, of course, was the trouble.

The trouble also was that everyone who worked in this building was so wrapped up in his own little world, in his own submicroscopic sliver of the universe, that he was completely oblivious to what was actually going on around him.

I took the shortcut past the mechanical room and the machine shop and turned the corner behind the animal labs. The animals, now all returned to their proper environment, scratched and snuffled in their darkened cages. As I passed by the cold rooms I couldn’t help but suppress a shudder. Both were now padlocked from the outside—a compromise Elliott had worked out with the police rather than sealing them off with crime-scene tape.

Glancing down the hall I was surprised to see a pool of light spilling out of the aquarium window of the crystallography lab. I told myself not to be alarmed. No doubt Michelle had left the light on by mistake—either that or one of the cleaning people who’d gone through earlier had forgotten to turn it off. I’d seen Michelle talking to Stephen earlier as they’d waited for Borland and the others to join them for dinner.

I peered cautiously through the window and immediately felt ridiculous. The room was empty. Nothing sinister was afoot, just a light carelessly left on, nothing more. I stepped inside and looked along the wall for a switch. That’s when I saw it.

Draped on the back of a chair behind the computer console was a white lab coat. It wasn’t the lab coat that held my attention, but what was clipped to the front of it. Michelle had not only left the light on in her hurry, but had left her ID card behind as well.

Slowly, I crossed the room to look at the ID. The picture was the usual unrecognizable blur, and all but the first five letters of the name were obscured by the bulky rectangular radiation tag, but instinctively I knew there was something wrong. I read the letters out loud: M, I, C, H, A—Michael, not Michelle. With my heart beating faster I knelt down to be sure. I squinted at the picture. The ID belonged to Michael Childress, not Michelle Goodwin.

I rocked back onto my heels as the various pieces of the puzzle clicked noiselessly into place. Not some man who’d been having an affair with Danny, not someone intent on bringing down the company, but quiet, shy, fiercely obsessed Michelle. Michelle, the woman whose dreams of the future hinged on her solving the structure of ZKBP and getting the credit for it.

I never saw what hit me. Something heavy swung with terrific force. I don’t remember the moment of impact or the moment when I first realized I was hurt. The only sensations were the warmth of my own blood oozing through my hair, and watching the world spin around me. My reactions no doubt slowed by concussion, I fell to the ground and looked up just in time to see Michelle Goodwin getting ready to take another swing at me. In her hand was a metal instrument that looked like a small baseball bat. Borland had one just like it in the protein lab. It was a special heavy-duty pestle used to pound spleen tissue into a bloody pulp.

Instinctively I curled up into a ball to ward off the impact of the next blow and, without consciously deciding to do so, rolled under the desk. The pestle hit the edge of the desk with a terrific impact as I scrambled to my hands and knees, trapped like an animal. Michelle had all the advantages. Not only did she have a weapon, but she was in tremendous shape physically. Mentally, she had already shown herself capable of killing two men.

Terrified, I realized my best chance was to try to get away from her even if only out into the hallway, where there was some chance Paramilitary Bill would catch sight of me on the video monitors. I wondered if, in his effort to follow my instructions and make sure that no one left the building, he would even bother to look at them.

“Fight back,” I told myself. I had read somewhere that people who had survived deadly attacks all had one thing in common—they all reported that they’d made the decision, consciously and early in the attack, to fight back. They had been willing to trade injury, even grievous injury, in exchange for survival.

Above me Michelle was hissing and muttering, spewing forth a steady stream of profanities and demanding that I come out. I took a deep breath and propelled myself with all my strength against her legs, throwing her off balance so that she fell forward with her entire weight on top of me. After that I did everything I could think of. I clawed, I scratched, I bit into her leg so hard that I tasted her blood even as she kicked me in the face to be free of me.

The instant her weight was off of me I scrambled to my feet and headed for the door. My odds did not seem particularly promising. Not only was she a trained athlete, but she was dressed for the lab in tennis shoes, while I was hampered by a tight skirt and a pair of three-hundred-dollar Italian high heels.

I realized I would never make it to the elevator or even the stairs without her overtaking me. Instead I darted into the darkened animal lab and crouched, panting and terrified, behind a row of caged monkeys that had been selectively raised to have a predisposition to high blood pressure.

I looked around in the dark for the nearest phone and saw to my dismay that it was at the opposite end of the room. I thought about making a run for it but decided I needed to find some sort of weapon first. It was only a matter of time, possibly seconds, before Michelle Goodwin came through the door swinging her deadly pestle. I had chosen my spot badly. There was nothing within reach that could be used as a weapon except twenty-pound bags of dog chow that were piled in a corner and a case of paper towels.

I saw her in the doorway framed against the light of the hall. She wasn’t even breathing hard but was staring into the darkness with the calm intensity of a predator. Instinctively I wanted to talk to her, to try to reason with her. Then I thought about Childress’s lingers, bloodied from trying to claw his way out of his icy prison, and decided I would only be digging my own grave.

When she switched on the light, I was ready for her. Holding a bulky bag of dog food across my chest, I used it like a battering ram as I charged, knocking her off her feet and back out into the hall. I barreled into her, shoving her against the wall, and grabbed for her neck with all my strength.

I knew that while I must be screaming, I was probably also crying. All I remember was holding on to her neck with all my might while she landed blow after blow.

In the end it was Paramilitary Bill who saved her life. Two minutes more and I would have choked her dead. Oddly, it wasn’t the sight of us trying to kill each other on the video monitor, but the howling of the terrified animals from the animal labs that had drawn him from his post. Still, it took all his strength to pull us apart, and even then she did not stop. Indeed the worst blows came while he watched, almost as if she drew strength from having an audience. I’ll never forget the look on Bill’s face when he heard the sound my forearm made as it was shattered by the flailing pestle.

Everything that came later had the flavor of an anticlimax, though by the time the police came, I had at least managed to compose myself. Looking back, the strangest thing was that it never even occurred to me to call Stephen. Indeed, when he showed up later, no doubt tracked down by Paramilitary Bill, I was actually surprised to see him. We never even really talked. I was busy giving my statement to Detective Rankin when Stephen arrived.

Elliott had shown up much earlier, at almost the same time as the police. Once he’d received my message, he’d called back immediately. When I didn’t answer, he called the police and then got into his car and broke the speed record out to Oak Brook. He found me sitting in the hall—someone must have dragged a chair out of one of the labs—I don’t remember. I was holding a chemical cold pack to a bleeding gash in my face with my good arm while paramedics fitted the broken one with a splint.

Before I would let him drive me to the emergency room, I insisted we go back upstairs to my office so that I could put the draft of the agreement on Stephen’s desk where I could be sure he’d see it in the morning. I tried not to get too much blood on it. Then I paged Claudia to have her meet us in the emergency room. I insisted we drive to Hyde Park instead of going to some doc-in-the-box suburban hospital. On the way I explained to him about Michelle.

“You see, Michelle has only ever wanted one thing and that is to be famous in her field, which is X-ray crystallography. And I’ve got to hand it to whoever steered her into crystallography in the first place—they knew what they were doing. It was just perfect for someone like her. Obsessed, driven, single-minded, a highly intelligent loner. The problem is that success in crystallography is as much about luck as it is about science. A good crystallographer can go his or her entire career without solving the structure of a really important molecule. So far, Michelle had had her chance at solving three of them, and every time, circumstances kept her from her prize. Straight out of graduate school she’d worked in a lab that was destroyed by a fire set by a disgruntled employee, and two years’ work was lost. After that she went to work on one of a pair of enzymes related to the function of aspirin, and while she did get some attention for successfully solving the structure, it turns out the other enzyme is the one that mattered.

“Based on her success with that, Stephen hired her to work on the company’s integrase project—that was an experimental AIDS drug they were working on—but they spent so much time trying to sell a deal to fund the project to a Japanese company called Okuda that another pharmaceutical company beat them to the structure.”

“Is that why she killed Danny? Because she didn’t want this deal you’re working on with the Japanese to go through?”

“Yes. You see, she didn’t care if Azor ever turned ZK-501 into a drug. She didn’t care if the company went bankrupt. Her interest has always been in purely academic research. All she wanted was to solve the structure of ZKBP so that she could return to academia wrapped in glory. She was afraid the company would get involved in another lengthy negotiation. She was desperate to prevent what had happened with Okuda from happening to her again.”

“Desperate enough to kill someone?”

“They all told me, every one of them, Borland, Remminger, even Stephen. I just wouldn’t listen.”

“What did they tell you?”

“In science no one cares how you get there, only that you get there first. Besides, killing Danny was so easy. He had come to her to ask about new AIDS drugs—she was the logical person to confide in. Not only did she have the expertise, but they were natural allies against Childress. All she had to do when he came home euphoric about the Japanese was to convince him to try some new treatment and inject him with PAF. I’m sure that when he started vomiting up blood it gave her a nasty surprise. It was obviously a struggle, but she had the strength and the presence of mind to keep him from getting help.

“I should have realized it was a woman from the way she managed to clean up the kitchen. I’m sure it never occurred to her that they’d look inside the drain for traces of blood. Other than that, she handled herself perfectly, even going so far as to steal the key to the guards’ room from the security desk at Azor and dispose of the videotape showing her coming into the building with the athletic bag containing the hypodermic, the syringe, and her bloody clothes.”

“Do you think they’re her fingerprints on the glass that was on the sink in Danny’s apartment?”