She reached the end of the line, paid her respects, and moved on. I lost sight of her by the time I made it through and thought she’d already left. But then I spotted her loading her plate at a large buffet table in the back. Maybe it was another one of those days when she hadn’t had time for lunch.
I made my way over to her. I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to try to talk to her. Maybe I could fall on my knees and beg her forgiveness. Or something.
She spotted me and gave me a half smile, which I took as at least modest encouragement. “How’re you doing?” she asked. “This must be pretty traumatic for your department.”
Not exactly an emotion-packed greeting, but at least it was welcoming. “Traumatic is right,” I said. “Although people are starting to calm down now. The chaplain and grief counselors have helped a lot.”
“Yeah, they’re good at what they do. Unfortunately, they’ve had lots of practice. This memorial will probably help too. I thought it was nice, except for Singer being an asshole.”
I chuckled softly. “Yes, he did go a bit overboard.” She seemed friendly, maybe even glad to see me. Or was that just the hopeful side of my imagination? I decided to risk it. “Karen, do you think we could have dinner again? Or something?”
She gave me a slow smile but with real warmth. “Yes, I’d like that. But we still have to wait until the case is finished. Especially with the decision on the new chief of detectives hanging in the balance.” She touched my arm lightly. Nothing that would be embarrassing to anyone looking on, but a gesture that said a lot. “Can you hold out?”
An enormous sense of relief washed over me. So there was hope after all. “Yes, I can hold out. Whatever it takes. How’re things on the case going?”
“Slow. Upton’s hired a lawyer, and there isn’t enough to arrest him. Especially since the word about Emily leaked out, we need something solid. But the detectives are busy working on crime-scene evidence and trying to find somebody who saw something that night.”
“No breaks?”
She hesitated. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but they found a broken yardstick in a dumpster a block away from the alley where she was killed. It was covered with blood, and they think it was used for the rape. Lots of Emily’s DNA, but so far, that’s it. Nothing from anybody else. Although they’re still analyzing samples.”
“Do you think they might find something more?”
“I don’t know. There’s always a possibility. But there was one other interesting thing. It wasn’t an ordinary yardstick. It was a special, heavy-duty kind. Which turns out to be the kind of yardstick the university orders in bulk for use as pointers in lecture halls and faculty offices.”
I knew just what she meant. I had one in my office. And Josh had used one in Upton’s office when we met there to discuss his and Laurie’s project last week. The day before Emily was killed.
16
It took a couple of weeks, but the department gradually returned to normal. Except that the women no longer walked home alone at night.
I hadn’t heard from Karen since the memorial service, so I assumed that the investigation was continuing without notable progress. Or that I’d misread her at the service, and Karen had no interest in rekindling our relationship. Or both.
I didn’t know what to make of her anymore. The thrill of our night together followed by her turnabout the next day. Then renewed hope at the memorial. And now silence. I understood the conflict between her job and our relationship, but this all seemed like the kind of ups and downs I was too old for. Only one thing was clear—if anything was going to happen between us, it would have to wait until the case was settled. I tried to put Karen on hold in a back corner of my mind until then. With only partial success.
On the other hand, work in the lab was moving forward, particularly Laurie’s collaboration with Josh. One of the new compounds he’d synthesized turned out to be even more effective than the previous version, and Laurie had shown that it worked against several different kinds of cancer cells—breast, colon, brain, and prostate—in addition to the lung cancer she’d first tried it on. And even more exciting, it worked with chemotherapeutic drugs as well as irradiation. Big news, but now the question was, What to do next? Both Laurie and Josh wanted to make some more derivatives, but this was going to require more sophisticated chemistry than Josh could handle without help.
In Upton’s absence, there weren’t any full-time chemists in the department. Singer was closest. He was always saying how useful his chemistry background was in collaborating with Upton. So when Upton was put on leave, I talked Singer into taking on the role of advisor to most of Upton’s students, including Josh. It hadn’t been easy to get him to accept the extra work, but I cajoled him into it by saying that he was really the only qualified member of the department to supervise students engaged in synthetic chemistry. Blatant as it was, the flattery worked.
Which meant that now I needed to set up a meeting with Singer for Laurie, Josh, and myself. It took a lengthy exchange of emails, but he finally found an opening in his schedule. After he took pains to point out that he didn’t think Josh and Laurie’s project was worthwhile and that he’d prefer to reassign Josh to work on one of his own projects instead of something that Upton had originated. Rather obnoxiously, he sent those emails not just to me but also to the students.
After all that, none of us particularly looked forward to talking with him. Nonetheless, when the time arrived for the scheduled meeting, Laurie, Josh, and I met outside Singer’s office. The door was closed, so I knocked. No answer. I tried again, still without a response. I shrugged my shoulders. “He’ll be here. Let’s just wait.”
It took less than five minutes before Laurie proclaimed, “He’s an asshole. Let’s go.”
“No, c’mon,” I said. “It was hard enough to arrange this. Just hang on.”
Fortunately, Josh seconded my request. “Yeah, hold on, Laurie. He may be an asshole, but we need his help.”
We waited. And waited. Until Singer finally got off the elevator and lumbered down the hall toward us—fifteen minutes after our scheduled meeting time.
He unlocked his office door without an apology. “All right, let’s get going. What is it that I can do for you?”
I tried to establish an atmosphere of cooperation as we took seats at his conference table. “Thanks for meeting with us. As you know, Laurie and Josh have some interesting results with a series of compounds Josh has made. We think the next step is to synthesize some additional derivatives, but we just don’t have the chemistry background to know what’s possible or how to go about it. That’s the part of the project where Upton was key, and we’re hoping you can step in and give us a hand. Of course, with full acknowledgment of your efforts by coauthorship when we publish.”
Singer nodded, apparently satisfied with the bait of authorship. “Sure, I can help you with synthesis. Show me what you’re after.”
“Can I use PowerPoint?” Josh asked.
Singer nodded toward a projector on his table, and Josh hooked up the laptop he’d brought with him. His first slide showed the compounds they’d tested so far with a summary of the key results with each.
“As you can see, this last derivative I made is significantly more effective than the starting compound,” Josh said.
He was pointing to the structures with his hand, and his back blocked my view of the screen. “Josh, could you use a pointer and stand to the side? I’m sorry, but I can’t see through you.”
“Of course, sorry.” He looked under the screen and got a pointer. The same kind that had been used on Emily. Then he showed me the structures again and moved on to the next slide. “Based on our results so far, I’d like to synthesize these two derivatives for further testing. You see that they have methyl and ethyl groups in place of the bromo group we have in our current compound. But this isn’t a simple reaction, and I need some help with the synthesis.”
Singer nodded
. “Yes, that sounds like a good thing to try. How do you think you’d go about making those compounds?”
Josh looked perplexed. “I’m afraid I have no idea. I don’t know that kind of chemistry.”
“And you were Upton’s student?” Singer scoffed. “You should figure out a plan for the synthesis yourself, not just ask me about it. You’re supposed to be a graduate student, learning to be an independent scientist.”
I sat up with a start. This was the kind of bullying some faculty members liked to use on their students. Show them who’s boss. It was stupid and inappropriate and decidedly not the kind of behavior I expected in my department.
Josh looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, but it really isn’t my field. I’ve tried to research it, but I need some guidance on the best approach.”
Singer raised his right eyebrow. “That’s ridiculous. Go do your homework, and come back when you have a proposal for me to look at.”
That was too much. I started to protest, but suddenly Laurie spoke up. “Oh wait, couldn’t we use a modified Schwinn reaction?”
Josh looked at her openmouthed, and Singer smiled. “Finally, somebody who knows some chemistry. I’m glad to see that at least one of the students working on this has some initiative. Let’s meet again after you give that a try and see how it works. Then I can give you more specific advice on how to tweak things to improve your yield.”
Laurie said it would probably take a couple of weeks to do the initial reactions, and we left. Once the three of us were out in the hall, I turned to her. “That was great, but where did it come from? I didn’t know you had any chemistry background.”
“Neither did I,” Josh said.
She smiled sweetly at us. “I don’t know any chemistry. There’s no such thing as a Schwinn reaction. I made it up. Schwinn is just the kind of bike I ride. That man is such a jerk, giving Josh shit when he doesn’t know anything himself.”
Josh broke into a fit of laughter, which Laurie quickly joined. I restrained myself with a smile and shake of my head. This was a new side of Mike Singer. Not just arrogant, but a bully. And a useless one, at least as far as chemistry was concerned.
I was still laughing to myself all the way back to my office. What a pompous ass! I wondered how long it would take Singer to figure out that Laurie had made a fool of him. I’d like to be a fly on the wall when he realized what had happened.
Kristy looked up and smiled when I entered the office. “You look like you’re in a good mood. Maybe this is a good time to talk about the financial stuff I’ve been working on.”
“You mean the missing twenty thousand? Sure, why not. Have you made progress?”
She picked up some papers and followed me into my office.
“I have, with Ed Carlson’s help. We’ve been able to trace the problem to three research accounts, from which the auditors have questioned whether some reimbursement requests are appropriate.”
“What do you mean? What kind of questions?”
“They’re mostly consulting fees to a woman from another institution, and the question is whether they can allowably be charged to our grants. She’s not listed as personnel on the grants, and the auditors say these are the kind of charges that typically come up when someone is using government funds to give presents to a girlfriend.”
I knew that the misuse of grant funds was a fairly common form of misconduct among scientists. But it was also something that I found abhorrent. “God, really? Whose grants are they?”
“They’re all big, multi-investigator grants, with a dozen or more faculty members on each. So it’s not clear who’s involved. But I do know the name of the woman in question. Sally Lipton, from Yale. Ed suggested that maybe you could research her science and figure out which of our faculty members she might be collaborating with.”
“It’s possible,” I said. “Give me the three grant numbers and the names of the faculty members on each of them. I’ll look up Sally Lipton and see if I can make a connection.”
Kristy handed me a sheet of paper. “I figured that’s what you’d need. Here you go.”
I started by pulling up information on the three grants from our department database. All three were big program project grants that funded collaborations between biologists and chemists under the umbrella of chemical biology. It was a hot area of interdisciplinary research that targeted the development of new drugs or other chemicals that were useful for biological investigations—everything from drugs to treat cancer to new dyes for studying cells in the microscope. About half of the faculty involved were in my department. I was on two of the grants myself, and four of our faculty members were on all three: Steve Upton, Mike Singer, and two others who were heavily into drug development. Presumably it was one of those four who was tied to Sally Lipton.
As Kristy had indicated, none of the grants listed Sally Lipton as either an investigator or a collaborator. That didn’t necessarily mean that she wasn’t working with one or more of our faculty members on the projects, but it certainly explained why payments to her from these accounts looked suspicious to an auditor.
Next, I googled Sally Lipton at Yale. That brought up her website in the Department of Chemistry. She was working in the general area of drug design, which made sense in terms of her involvement as a potential collaborator on our projects. But there were no joint publications with any of our faculty members in the list of her papers, which covered the last five years.
That didn’t look good for an active collaboration, but maybe there were some older papers that would at least explain a connection. I went into PubMed, the National Library of Medicine’s database of scientific publications. Searching there for Sally Lipton brought up almost a hundred papers published over the last fifteen years. Then I searched her publications for each of my four faculty members as coauthors. Success. She had three papers coauthored with Mike Singer, published between ten and twelve years ago.
Full copies of Lipton’s papers with Singer were available online, and I pulled them up for a closer look. Interestingly, the only institution listed in the bylines was Yale. Then I remembered. We’d recruited Singer to BTI from Yale somewhere around ten years ago, before I was chair of the department. It looked like he had known and worked with Lipton while he was a faculty member at Yale. Maybe they were continuing their collaboration, but there was no evidence of ongoing work between them. That made it hard to discount the possibility that they’d developed and maintained a more intimate kind of relationship.
I had one more window back to Singer’s years at Yale. His personnel file would contain all the details of his recruitment here, including references from his former colleagues at Yale, as well as correspondence related to his status in the field, such as nominations for awards and prizes. Would any of those letters be written by Lipton or refer to the two of them?
I got up and went to the filing cabinet that contained confidential personnel files for all the department’s faculty members. Singer’s was thicker than most, which was no surprise, given his stature and seniority. It was going to take more than a quick read to get through it.
I started at the front of the file, with the most recent material. I’d seen everything that had come in over the last few years, since I’d been chair, so I scanned that quickly. There were lots of letters with glowing reports of Singer’s accomplishments and considerable reputation. But nothing from or about Sally Lipton. Then I had to slow down as I worked back in time, but it was more of the same. Accolades from around the world, supporting him for various awards and honors. But nothing that mentioned Sally Lipton. Half an hour later, I made it back to the beginning, when we had recruited Singer from Yale.
And then it stopped making sense. He was already a major player in his field when we got him here, and his recruitment had been a big deal. There were a dozen or so letters from faculty members at leading universities testifying to his accomplishments. And lengthy correspondence between Singer and Richard Solomon, chair of the department at the time,
regarding the terms of Singer’s appointment. Singer had demanded a high salary, lots of lab space, and a substantial amount of discretionary money from the university that he could use for supplies, equipment, and research personnel in his lab. It was a protracted negotiation, with Solomon making offers and Singer replying that Yale had already countered with better terms that BTI now had to match. Nothing unusual there. That was the way negotiations with star faculty went, although this was a bit tackier than most.
But as I looked through it, I realized there was a big piece missing. There were no copies of the counteroffers from Yale that Singer repeatedly referred to, just his statements of what they were. That was bizarre. We always required copies of counteroffers from the candidate’s current institution in a negotiation like this. Trust but verify was a firm policy of the BTI administration. Yet there was nothing here to indicate that Yale was trying to keep him.
And then I realized it went even deeper. There was nothing from anyone at Yale about him in the file. No recommendations from colleagues, no praise from administrators, no comments from his department chair. Just nothing. As if his departure was shrouded in official silence.
The only times I knew something like this to happen were when faculty members left their institutions under a cloud. Either on bad terms with their home departments or as a resolution to some kind of misconduct dispute, typically with a nondisclosure agreement in place. Meaning Singer had probably been bluffing about Yale’s efforts to retain him, and we had been suckered into meeting nonexistent counteroffers. And more important, it looked like something had gone sour for him at his previous institution.
I needed to figure this out. If Singer had been involved in some kind of problem at Yale, it could come back to bite us by compromising the credibility of his testimony against Upton. Of course, it could have been just an angry disagreement with his department chair about space or resources. But it was also possible that he’d been under investigation for some kind of misconduct. Judging from the way he’d treated Josh, he could easily have gotten into trouble for harassing his students. That wouldn’t be so bad for us, but I had an uneasy feeling that he could have been involved in the same kind of financial fraud that seemed to be going on here. And was Sally Lipton somehow involved—both then and now?
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