The Timer Game (9 page)

The V of the building opened into floor-to-ceiling windows, revealing the view. Here the ocean was a churning presence, a gray and blue highway carrying Navy traffic and fishing trawlers out to sea. The skyline of La Jolla glinted in bright sun, and far to the south, Mexico’s Coronado Islands rose like the purple humps of a prehistoric sea monster.

On scattered sofas people waited. They waited in the halls, milling around. On chairs by the entrance. They waited in pairs and family groupings and alone. It seemed to Grace as if that waiting defined the essence of the Center. It was saturated with a pain borne of that waiting, and a longing so intense it seemed distilled, the longer she was away from it.

She headed past the information kiosk to the elevators. A family marshaled a boy of about ten out into the hall, his wheelchair sticking as it bumped over the elevator groove. His younger sister hopped next to him in excitement. The mother had a trembly half-smile on her face, as if smiling even that much was too costly.

Grace rode the elevator alone to three. The joke was, the Center was built on a bluff and run on one, and Grace had heard it repeated more times than she could count by jealous colleagues of Warren’s who didn’t realize they knew each other personally. She never repeated it; it was petty, but it spoke clearly to the empire he had built and the enemies he’d made.

Damaged adults and children wounded by disorders and limping from attacks leveled against them by their own immune systems flocked to the Center for specialized treatment, hoping for the miracle cure that would stop their bodies from viciously destroying themselves. Warren Pendrell promised nothing, but something in his manner must have communicated hope. People lined up for clinical trials.

She’d spent part of her residency on loan from Johns Hopkins working in the Center’s sophisticated pediatric heart transplant unit, and Warren had taken her immediately under his wing. Those were the giddy days when she was a rising star and everything was working, but that was a long time ago and when she’d left medicine, part of what she’d jettisoned was the safety of his mentorship, the easy way doors opened and the belief that anything professionally was still possible. Now she approached his offices with the caution and respect they deserved.

The elevator opened and she faced smoked glass doors with Warren’s name engraved in brass:
DR. WARREN PENDRELL, DIRECTOR.

Another name was inscribed in smaller script underneath:
LABS OF DR. LEE ANN BENTLEY.

Grace felt the beginning of a headache, seeing the name. Lee had been a coldly amoral researcher hungry for grants and recognition when Grace had known her five years before. Now she’d moved up to the major leagues, sharing lab space with Warren himself. Grace had managed to avoid seeing Lee in earlier visits. But today she didn’t feel lucky.

Grace opened the heavy door leading to the reception area. This smaller lobby glowed in a soft shade of gold, the center of the room dominated by a carved marble statue of an angel and child. A drug salesman looked up incuriously from a trade magazine and went back to reading,

his briefcase of samples bulging at his feet.

Grace went to the counter and waited as the receptionist finished a call. The receptionist was middle-aged, efficient, with a helmet of dyed black hair and a chest that jutted forward like the prow of an immense ship. She put down the telephone and turned to Grace.

“Yes?” Her face was neutral. She’d missed a spot with her eyebrow pencil, and one of her brows had a small, disconcerting patch of white in the middle of what otherwise was a perfect walnut-brown arched wing.

“Cynthia. Could you please alert Warren I’m here.”

“And you are?”

Cynthia knew exactly who she was. This was a petty humiliation she put Grace through every time. “Grace. Descanso.”

“Identification?”

Grace pulled out her crime lab ID instead of her driver’s license and was heartened to see a quiver of surprise in Cynthia’s eyes before she recovered.
Good. Let her think I’m here on official business. Serves her right.

“Do you have an appointment?” She touched her pearls. The necklace was so long she could hang herself.

“No.” Grace stared her down and felt a sharp surge of victory when Cynthia turned away first. She really needed to play more board games.

“He’s very busy.”

“He wants to see me.”

“I’ll let him be the judge of that. Sit and wait.” It was an order.

Grace smiled thinly and went to the window, looking out. Far away, hang gliders floated over a blue expanse of sea, and clouds threaded the soft sky. Behind her, she heard Cynthia whispering into a phone. The steel door behind the counter slid open.

“Grace!”

Warren had a forceful way of dominating a room, his energy thrusting itself into the place moments before he spoke, which gave her the unsettled feeling of being constantly in the presence of a sonic boom. He was in his late sixties but tall and fit-looking. His silver-white hair was precision cut, and he wore dark linen trousers and a blue cashmere sweater that matched his eyes.

He bared his teeth in a smile. The door wickered shut behind him. He stepped into the lobby. “Cynthia taking good care of you?”

Grace shot a smug smile at Cynthia but it was wasted. Cynthia shuffled papers, pretending to be busy.

Warren didn’t wait for an answer. He gripped Grace’s elbow gently and moved her out of harm’s way as he stood for a moment under the retinal scanner. The red light beamed into his eyes. He blinked and the door reopened.

“Quickly, quickly.”

He let her back into a hallway as the steel door closed behind them. They were in a corridor with laboratories. Grace could hear a synthesizer whirring softly in a lab down the hall and the muted sound of voices coming from a conference room.

Warren turned and studied her, and the heartiness in his face fell away and was replaced with anger. “He could have killed you, damn it. I’ve left three messages since yesterday. You couldn’t pick up the phone and let me know you were all right?”

“I wanted to come in person.” She wondered if he could tell she was lying. “I have questions about Eddie Loud.”

Warren glanced quickly at the conference room and Grace realized Warren didn’t want whoever was in there overhearing them.

“Follow me. I’ve got a meeting going on so I don’t have much time.”

In all the years she’d known him, he’d always had a meeting going on. Something big.

Warren had started the Center as an under-funded biotech company thirty years earlier, and hit the jackpot with a drug that became widely used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, inhibiting the immune system from attacking the body’s own cartilage. He’d taken that money and bought land, eventually building the Center for BioChimera. Now the company had grown to over three thousand employees worldwide, with manufacturing plants scattered across the globe.

But it was the hospital side that had attracted her. The chance to work with pediatric heart transplant patients and pursue new methods of controlling transplant rejection. When she’d been offered a residency, she’d jumped at it.

Warren had immediately singled her out, something that stunned her and made her uneasy at the same time. She had no interest in following Warren Pendrell into hospital administration, but soon learned his interest was more complicated.

He’d lost a daughter about her age, he confided finally. Warren’s pain at losing his daughter, Sara, and Grace’s need to have a dad, melded during her work at the Center. That and a mutual passion for research and healing. He’d personally recommended her for a position at Cedars-Sinai after her residency, and had helped set up the two months she’d spent in Guatemala working in a remote mountain clinic.

And then she’d come back from Guatemala and dropped out of medicine and taken a job at the crime lab.

She’d never told him why and Warren never let it drop, how her place was back at the Center leading the assault on transplant rejection and doing heart surgery on kids, instead of wasting her talent in some two-bit job with the police, barely scraping by.

She’d delivered Katie at the Center when the time came, and later Katie had ear surgery as a baby there, but the relationship between Warren and Grace had grown increasingly strained until it had erupted in a frightening outburst of pyrotechnics, Warren insisting she tell him why she’d given up medicine, Grace holding to silence. He’d apologized but she sensed lurking beneath the surface a fierce need to control, a need he was barely able to keep in check. Now their contact was relegated to stray lunches and occasional phone calls.

“Do you know how many people I’ve mentored here in all these years? Exactly two.”

“Warren.” It was the opening volley of a familiar war and she didn’t have the taste for it.

“Fine, fine, I’ll stop.”

She followed him into his private library and waited as he scooped up an open reference book from a leather sofa. The room was large, airy, painted Italian custard.

A plaster fireplace vaulted in sweeping simplicity, surrounded by chairs in a rich palette of gold and red, accenting his favorite painting, a Degas that hung near his Italian rosewood writing desk. Two walls held floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. It was here he kept his collection of science journals, books on philosophy and religion and first-edition nineteenth-century European novels.

“Sit anyplace.” He turned his back on her and went to the window. “I’m relieved you’re all right, by the way,” he said gruffly. “More relieved than you’ll know.”

She sank into the leather sofa. Soft sunlight floated through raw silk panels, spilling wide bands of light across the tiled floor.

He turned and she saw how tired he looked under the tan. “I don’t mean to be short. I’m under more pressure than usual this week, that’s all, and then when I heard how close you’d come to dying—well, it seems to have unhinged me. What do you need?”

“Answers. You knew him personally, didn’t you? Eddie Loud.”

He gave her a long, measured look. “I think I’ll have a drink. May I get you something? Perhaps fresh papaya juice?”

“Sounds wonderful.”

He went to the sideboard, glancing at the photograph of his daughter he kept in a small gilt frame. Taken years ago, it revealed a young woman with a strong jaw and merry eyes. She was lost in a corn maze, laughing, not sure which way led to the exit. It had been shot from above looking down, and the exit was within reach. She just couldn’t find it.

Losing her way seemed to have been a chronic problem. Sara had been a sophomore at Brandeis when she’d fallen in love with a foreign exchange student who police discovered was traveling with false papers and a criminal record. He was deported and six weeks later, she’d dropped out of school and followed him to Central America. Warren sent a former Green Beret to capture her and drag her home, but she’d run away again, and this time he’d left her alone.

Warren’s gaze left the photo and settled on Grace. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “What do you need to know?”

She told him what Eddie Loud had said right before she killed him.

The color drained from his face. “Good God. You’re sure he said ‘he’s coming for you’? Those exact words?”

“Yes. I’ll never forget it.”

Warren fixed their drinks, his face troubled. He handed Grace her glass and sat down, taking a long drink of scotch and rolling the heavy glass between his palms, studying the amber liquid. “‘Run. He’s coming for you. The Spikeman.’ Any ideas?”

She shook her head. “I was hoping it made sense to you.” She took a sip of juice. It was sweet and wonderfully pulpy.

He was silent, mulling something over. He looked up.

“He’s dead. Under the circumstances, I guess I can tell you some things.”

Warren drank some more and the ice clinked. He studied the glass.

“Eddie Loud was schizophrenic. You know on the research side of the Center, we specialize in immunological disorders and treatment. We do the usual—arthritis, lupus, MS, transplant compatibility, but the last few years, since you left, we’ve added schizophrenia to the list. That’s what we do behind those wire windows on two.”

“How can schizophrenia be an immunological disorder?”

“Might not be, jury’s still out, but there’s a possibility that a simple virus in the fourth month in utero could contribute to a wiring problem significant enough to create it. We used magnetic resonance imaging and found structural defects in the temporal lobes, some cell changes. Anyway, we’re exploring whether we can reverse that damage on chromosone 6—not just throwing drugs at the problem after the fact. It’s delicate and difficult.”

“You were experimenting on Eddie Loud?” It sounded colder than she’d intended, and Warren flinched and drained his glass.

“Yes, he was enrolled in our experimental program and yes, the combination of gene therapy, drugs, and behavior modification seemed to be helping. I’ve known his dad four years or so. Eddie’s bounced around other treatment centers and Bert—that’s his dad, Senator Loud—heard about the work we were doing here and pleaded with me to take him. Big mistake. Clearly.”

Grace’s glass was empty and she put it down and slid her hands under her legs to warm them. “I don’t understand why he fixated on me.”

“I don’t either.” He shrugged. “There’s a chance he could have made it up. Eddie had a peculiar fascination for video. When he fell off his meds, he believed himself to be a hotshot reporter, going after the big story. In his room at the halfway house, they’d find equipment he’d ordered over the Internet and squirreled away, and once even props from a Hollywood set he’d managed to buy off eBay.”

She could see the headline:
ALCOHOLIC CRIME LAB FORENSIC BIOLOGIST KILLS ALMOST DEFENSELESS MENTALLY ILL SON OF SENATOR.

“That still doesn’t explain how he got my name and matched it to my face. And knew I was going to be at that particular meth house.”

Warren scrubbed his jaw with his knuckles. “God, what a mess.”

He put down his glass and moved to a wall of books. Long thin windows had been built into the shelves, revealing sudden views, as surprising as if the views themselves were a work of art. Soft clouds filtered across the narrow stamp of blue sky.