Knockout Mouse (29 page)

“Wes,” he said, his voice thick and dreamy.

“Get dressed. We’re coming over.”

“We who? You’re doing nothing of the sort, Bill. I’m not home anyway.”

“That’s all I need to know.”

I hung up and we headed for Berkeley. Wes’s Jeep was parked in the space next to Marion’s Volvo above the bungalow. It took a minute for Marion to answer the door. She was wrapped in a silk robe. Her hair was tangled, and she didn’t look happy to see us.

“You missed the fireworks at LifeScience this morning,” I said.

Her face brightened. “Come in. Tell me all about them.”

The three of us walked into the living room. An open bottle of white wine was sitting on the coffee table. Karen took the rocking chair, and I sat in a straight back chair next to her. Abe sat on one side of the sofa, Marion on the other.

“We found out who killed Sheila,” I said to her. “Doug Englehart. But I think you already knew that.”

Marion cocked her head. “You’re sure Doug’s the one?”

“You wanted it to be Neil Dugan, didn’t you?”

She avoided the question. Nodding at the bottle of wine, she said, “This calls for a toast.”

It was three in the afternoon, but I didn’t object. “Have Wes join us,” I said.

Marion went to the kitchen. “Wes!” she called into the bedroom. She came back out with five glasses. Wes followed, barefoot, rubbing his head. His sweatshirt was inside out. He curled up next to Marion on the sofa. Abe shifted to the far edge.

Marion filled the glasses and passed them out. She raised hers and said, “Here’s to getting your man.”

She clinked Wes’s glass first. Judging by the heaviness of his lids and the hang of his jaw, the love, or at least lust, hormones were flowing again.

“So it was Doug Englehart,” Marion said. “I suppose he was driven enough to do something like this, if his molecule was threatened.”

“For a long time I thought it was Dugan, too,” I said. With Abe’s help, I rehearsed the scene that had taken place in Dugan’s office this morning. Marion nodded. She said she wished she’d been there, but she didn’t appear shocked by our revelations.

“Do you have the day off?” Karen asked.

“I have a lot of days off,” Marion replied. “I quit.”

“You’re the one who spilled the beans to Curaris, aren’t you?” I asked. “Yesterday, while I was being chased down by Dugan.”

She smiled benevolently. “Oh now, you can’t prove that. But they ought to have known the truth before signing the deal.”

Abe folded his hands and peered at Marion. “Was it just Dugan you wanted to discredit, or the entire company?”

She grimaced. “You just put your finger on the problem. They’re becoming one and the same.”

“That’s still not a good enough reason to withhold information that pointed to Doug,” I said.

“What information?”

“The missing pages from Sheila’s diary.”

To Marion’s
moi?
gesture, I replied, “You were the last one in Sheila’s apartment before the manager shut it down. You figured out where she’d hidden the pages. Where are they?”

Wes’s eyes opened a little wider. He stared at Marion. She sighed. Using Wes’s leg to boost herself up, she went to the bedroom. She returned with a handful of folded, crumpled pages, which she handed to Abe. “Sorry, Abe. I would have given them to you eventually.”

“What do they say?” Karen asked.

“That Doug was forbidding her to continue research on the mouse. That he tried to force her out of the group. That she thought he’d cooked the results. That his resentment of Frederick was turning pathological.”

“You’re so irresponsible, Marion,” Abe said. “Those pages would have saved us a lot of conflict.” He turned to me. “But you hadn’t read them either, Bill. How, up there in Dugan’s office, did you suspect Doug was the one?”

“It started when he told me Carl Steiner had come looking for Sheila. That didn’t square with what I’d seen of Steiner.
Doug was the one with the temper. As I thought about it, I realized Doug was in a similar position to McKinnon in terms of knowledge, motive, and opportunity. When Doug ranted about MC124 being his creation, and shifted the blame to Carl, I began to think he was the one.”

“It seems so logical now. What amazes me is that he didn’t try to cover his tracks better than he did,” Karen said.

“You know how some scientists can be,” Marion said, trying to recover some credibility. “They grow up being first in their class, first in their school, smarter than anyone for miles. Supremely confident in their own mental powers. Doug saw his scheme as foolproof. He was so sure of his genius, it didn’t occur to him anyone could unravel it.”

“I know the kind,” Karen said. “But don’t paint us all with that brush.”

“I’m not. McKinnon has an ego this big,” she responded, spreading her arms, “but he’s sensitive enough to know he can be wrong, too. That’s what makes him more of a leader than Doug. There was a reason Doug was never put in charge of his own program.”

“And Sheila was another kind of scientist altogether. The truest kind, I think,” Karen added.

“I don’t understand why she tore those diary pages out,” Abe said.

“Because they implicated Doug,” Karen answered. “She began to suspect he was out of control. She didn’t know how far he would go. What if he found her journal?”

We all took a drink of wine, contemplating how far Doug did go. His inability to control his emotions was clear. Sheila must have seen it, too.

“Marion,” I said, “if LifeScience was doing something illegal
or unethical, I would have been glad to help you stop it. Why didn’t you come forward with these pages and work with me?”

“I was afraid you’d come up with the wrong answer,” she replied. There was no indecision in her voice.

“Meaning the right answer.”

“Right for you, wrong for me. Our objectives were different. That was why I couldn’t trust you.”

Wes had edged away from Marion. He was sitting up straight now. “But this was a murder,” he said.

A quick series of emotions flashed across her face: indignation, betrayal, and finally resolve. She sat erect and said, “There’s a lot more to this than one scientist doing wrong, Wes. I had my sights on bigger issues. What Doug did to one woman was reprehensible, but what Dugan is doing is, in the long run, far worse for far more people.”

“McKinnon could have gone down for the crime,” I said.

“I wasn’t worried about Frederick. He’d have beaten the charge.” She took a sip of wine, then realized we were waiting for more. “I would have helped you get Doug
eventually,
Bill. Other priorities came first.”

“I don’t like Dugan either, but—”

“You saw what he was doing to the company. Undermining its original purpose. Twisting it away from genuinely useful science and toward straight short-term profit. It’s bad enough when an old-economy business operates that way, but in a field like this… We’re appropriating more and more cosmic powers for ourselves. How do you feel about a man like Dugan holding the keys to the code of life in his hand?”

Marion shuddered. Karen did too, and that gave me pause. “I love my work,” Karen said. “But it’s true, a lot depends on who’s in charge of this technology. And what their motives are.”

Abe had been quiet, absorbed in thought. “Marion,” he said at last, “I’m going to think about what you’re saying. I may even find that I agree with some of your ideas. But I’ll never agree with your methods.”

“You’re a doctor, Abe. You save one life at a time. I admire that. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t have a life depend on me. What happened to Sheila was terrible, inexcusable, and people should be punished for it. I just have a wider view of which people are responsible.”

Abe’s hands and eyes remained steady. He did not look at Marion. “Your perceptions may be valid,” he said. “Perhaps they would remain so even if it was your own sister’s life in question. I hope you never have to find out.”

Marion drained her glass and looked away. Wes stared straight ahead, avoiding her eyes.

“LifeScience will be investigated, you can count on that,” I said. “When this murder comes out, the company will draw all kinds of attention—but not the kind they were expecting from the Curaris deal.”

“And I’ll be helping every inch of the way,” Marion said.

“You’re leaving the bench?” Karen asked.

Marion shook her head vehemently. “No, I’ll keep working in the field somewhere. It’s up to us, Karen, the ones on the inside. We know what’s really going on.”

“I don’t know that anyone knows what’s really going on,” Karen said. “Every degree closer we come to the control of nature—to what we tell ourselves is the control of nature—convinces me that we’re not in charge. I’m not saying anyone else is. All I can tell you is that the more I know, the more it becomes clear how little I know.”

“You know what you choose to know,” Marion replied.

“And you see what you choose to see,” Karen said. “McKinnon wanted to see MC124 as saving the world and his own career. He couldn’t bear the idea that it was flawed, and that made him quite willing to be fooled by Doug. Dugan was trained to see breaches in company security, and that’s what he saw when he looked at Sheila. You saw Dugan’s guilt, Marion, and you keep on seeing it. I don’t mean to single you out—we all do it. I don’t know what the solution is, except to look at the results. Just take an honest look at the results.”

» » » » »

I dropped Karen off at her apartment and we said our good-byes, at least for the time being. I had a feeling I was going to miss her honesty and her clear-eyed readiness.

I thought about what she had said at Marion’s house. Earlier in the day, I’d picked up a message from Jenny on my answering machine. Her voice was back to its old chirpy self. She told me not to worry about the mess in her apartment: it gave her a chance to get new curtains and new lamps. She hoped I was safe and that Sheila’s murder had been resolved.

Jenny sounded back in charge of her life. I was glad for that, even though things had become difficult between us. I didn’t want her to feel bad. But the congeniality of her voice masked something else. She’d taken some kind of decision, and I had a good idea what it was. She’d decided to break off our relationship. It wouldn’t surprise me. I wasn’t who she thought I was, she’d tell me. And I would agree, without rancor.

The time had come for us to separate what we wanted to see in each other from who we actually were. I wasn’t who
I
thought I was just two weeks ago, when I’d been in search of bearings. As awful as Sheila’s death and all that came after it had been,
they had propelled me into a new state. The compass needle was vibrating. I was getting a reading.

I pointed the Scout west across the valley. The sun was setting and it shot straight into my eyes. The turn to Jenny’s apartment came and went on my left. I felt no urge to hit my blinker. The ramp for 280, the freeway to San Francisco, came along soon after. I flipped up the blinker handle, turned right onto the ramp, and headed north.