Human Remains

by Melissa Yi

  Work intervened. Tom sent me an e-mail detailing several projects I could start on. I could assist any of the scientists with their project during my month. He wrote, "Normally, we would have discussed this earlier, but with Susan's illness and the events of the past few days, we'll have to set a goal for you tomorrow." He'd enclosed links to everyone's bios and papers.

  I'd have to skim all the research and then pick whichever project was not only compelling, but would garner a good research paper. Although I was tempted to pick Samir, because he was a prize-winning researcher eager to have a student, I should do due diligence. I clicked on the first link.

  Before I could absorb the abstract, Mitch flung open the lab door from the hallway.

  I leapt to my feet. This was my chance to grill him about White Birthright, and I had to nab him before he either started working or cuddling with Summer. "Mitch. Hey!"

  He glanced at me before his attention lasered in on Summer, at the fume hood near the front of the lab. He boomed, "This just in. They found cyanide."

  Summer nearly dropped her pipette. "What are you talking about?"

  "Ducky. That's what I heard. Her test came back positive for cyanide." Mitch stood with his shoulders back, eyeballing each of us.

  Dr. Wen frowned and turned off his tablet.

  Samir rushed toward him from the rear of the lab. "How did you hear of this?"

  "I have my connections," said Mitch.

  Yes, Harold. Who else? This time, I'd bet on someone from the hospital ER.

  Chris strolled toward him from his corner. Mitch edged closer to Summer, who was spraying down her fume hood, tossing her gloves, and hanging up her lab coat on a hook on the door to Tom's office. She said, "I don't believe it!"

  Samir echoed, "This is a travesty."

  Summer ignored him as she hustled to Mitch's side. "Tell us everything."

  Mitch repeated, à haut volume, "Her blood tested positive for cyanide." He wasn't adding information. It was CNN Syndrome all over again.

  I cut in. "Do you know what the levels were? Smokers have higher levels of cyanide in their blood."

  Mitch's eyes widened before he rallied at me. "Ducky wasn't a smoker. She was Muslim."

  "I understand that. But do you know what the levels were, or just that she tested positive for cyanide?"

  "Just that she tested positive," he said, clearly hating me for raining logic on his parade, but both carbon monoxide and cyanide levels are elevated in smokers, because guess what? Cigarettes are lethal, baby.

  Still, that was interesting. A tablespoon of potassium cyanide can kill you within hours. Inhaling cyanide works even faster. A cyanide molecule resembles oxygen to the point that the body preferentially binds to it instead of oxygen. This shuts down the Krebs cycle that you need to bring energy (ATP) to any cells of the body.

  Without oxygen or energy, your brain doesn't work, so you get confused, dizzy, and light-headed. You start to seize. Your heart doesn't work, so you go into heart blocks and arrhythmias. And then you die.

  I'd never seen a case of cyanide poisoning. I know it's an ancient toxin. Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves with cyanide, although he also shot himself to seal the deal.

  Cyanide is a classic emergency medicine exam question: if you see a patient who's been in a fire, you should test them for cyanide, or consider treating on spec, because when plastics burn, they can emit cyanide. If you don't remember to treat for cyanide, your theoretical patient will start to seize and die.

  Ducky hadn't been in a fire. So if Mitch's source was correct, Ducky had been poisoned. Exactly as I'd said when I first heard about the vomiting and diarrhea. Even though other things can cause V&D—anaphylaxis, gastroenteritis, narcotic withdrawal, drugs like physostigmine—now the question was how someone had managed to slip her some cyanide. It could have been suicide, but I didn't believe it.

  "We should do something for her family," Summer was saying. "Maybe we could send flowers, or have a memorial."

  "We could," Mitch said.

  "We could take donations," said Samir, and Summer bestowed a smile upon him.

  I nodded my agreement. I'd donate, but the last time we talked about this, it was to raise money for Lawrence's family. Now would we split the proceeds between Joan and Dahiyyah's families, or have two different funds?

  Awkward. I'd let Summer handle it.

  I glanced at the USB memory stick plugged into my computer. As discreetly as possible, I ejected the memory stick and pocketed it. Dahiyyah's death was going to make it doubly hard to check if Lawrence had been testing the Zisa virus, because their lab would stay shut down and cordoned off.

  The only people who'd return to the lab quickly were Dr. Hay and Stephen Weaver.

  How could I get those two to test for the Zisa virus in any of his samples, when I wasn't friends with either of them, and they could've harmed Dahiyyah?

  I cleared my throat. "How are Dr. Hay and Dr. Weaver taking this?"

  Mitch frowned at me. I'd interrupted his treatise on how to use GoFundMe. "Stephen took the rest of the day off. Dr. Hay is at a meeting."

  Attending a meeting seemed like a cold-blooded reaction to her "invaluable" research assistant's death. I know the show must go on, in research as well as in show business, but come on. Meanwhile, Stephen Weaver taking the day off meant he was either too upset to concentrate, or he was treating it like a holiday. "Were either of them present when Dahiyyah died?"

  "What are you saying, Hope?" said Summer.

  Mitch's voice cut across hers. "Dr. Hay found her and reported her right away. She seemed shaken up when I passed her in the hall."

  "Hmm." I've heard a few truisms about crime. One is that you should always look to the spouse/partner. Another is that you should question whoever discovered the body. "What time did she find her?"

  Mitch tilted his head back to look at me. Everyone else's gaze swung back and forth like this was a ping pong tournament. "I heard them say it was at 6:40 a.m. I came in around 7:30. You want to arrest me, too?"

  "I'll leave that to the police." I checked my watch. It was 12:23 now. That was a fast turnaround time for cyanide, but maybe her blood gas had shown a metabolic acidosis. Combined with a high lactate level and a negative carbon monoxide and methemoglobin test, they could have assumed it was cyanide. Even so, it was awfully speedy for them to announce it, and for the news to spread to Mitch. "Who told you about the cyanide?"

  "Ah. I never kiss and tell." He winked at me. Chris raised his eyebrows.

  Summer said, "Thank God you've got resources. Otherwise, we'd have no idea what was going on."

  Right. Or else we still had no idea what was going on, and Mitch was trying to mislead us. I watched Mitch nudge Summer with his elbow and give Samir a high five, and I wondered, Who is this guy, and what, exactly does he do?

  Chapter 40

  I kept my cool for the rest of the afternoon. Or at least, I tried to.

  I shot a glance at Mitch, ensconced at his bench near the back of the lab, two over from Chris. My bench faced toward Mitch's, but he faced the Lentihood. Although I couldn't deduce much from the back of his head, my eyeballs were magnetically attracted to him. I'd pretend to check the clock, or scratch my nose, but really, I was watching Mitch.

  Before Lawrence and Dahiyyah had died, I'd been swimming in a fog of fear. In medicine, it's called generalized anxiety disorder, because I was perpetually worried instead of having individual panic attacks.

  Now that Mitch was a person of interest, I'd ramped up from a 6 to an 8 on the eternal anxiety scale.

  Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Denis, my therapist, had said that and cackled. Then he'd apologized, because I sure as hell hadn't found it funny.

  I'd assumed the Scoobies were benign. Friendly. What you see is what you get. And maybe they were. But when people around them dropped dead, it behooved me to exercise caution.

  I still wasn't worried about Summer. Chris, I withheld
judgment because I didn't know the guy. He didn't talk. It was early days for Dr. Wen and Samir too. I couldn't stand Stephen Weaver. I wanted to like Dr. Hay, because she was a strong woman who headed her lab, but she seemed so cold.

  My head spun in too many directions, like a bad Choose Your Own Adventure™.

  I texted assurances to Ryan and Tucker and my dad. Yes, I'm alive. I'm fine. Don't worry about me. Just another day at the killer lab. Then I started researching Mitchell Lubian. I ignored his social media accounts, including the video of him playing guitar on YouTube, and zeroed in on his publications.

  I had trouble decoding some of his more technical papers, like the use of bone marrow stromal cells to make hyaline cartilage. Luckily, he'd co-written one with Tom on human pluripotent stem cells, so I could read that and legitimately educate myself. Before I came here, Tucker and Tori had to explain to me that George W. Bush's campaign against the use of embryos for stem cells became obsolete in 2007, when Shinya Yamanaka figured out how to reprogram adult cells into stem cells, and co-won the Nobel Prize for his efforts.

  Next, I checked out Dahiyyah Safar. It's an unusual name, so she should have lots of unique hits.

  Nope.

  She'd graduated from Ottawa University two years ago. At several different conferences, she'd presented her thesis on the neonatal rat model for the virulence of the mumps virus in humans. And that was about it.

  I didn't expect her to be all over social media, like Mitch. But her online presence was weaker than my baby brother's.

  My phone buzzed. Joan sent me a picture of Might I, who was sleeping. What do you think of the name Angella?

  Inside, I recoiled at both the religiousness and the spelling, but naming a baby is the parents' prerogative. It's a name that reminds me of angels. We usually spell it Angela here.

  Angella Acayo!!!!!! Followed by a gif of floating hearts.

  I smiled and sent her a happy emoticon. She deserved whatever pleasure she could get.

  I flipped to Dr. Judith Hay. She seemed to have a pretty good score on ResearchGate, a site designed to measure your influence on the research world.

  Stephen Weaver's name began appearing as an author and co-author with Dr. Hay. He hadn't been working long enough to have publications with her, but they'd submitted articles together, and he'd presented in Washington last month.

  Suddenly, I understood what had bothered me. Dr. Hay had insisted Ducky was so, so crucial, and yet Ducky/Dahiyyah didn't have a single article published under her name since she'd started working for Dr. Hay. I know publication schedules can drag out, so it's possible that she might have something cooking for Science or Nature or whatever the big virology journal is.

  But in my limited experience, research assistants and lab techs usually get their names on an article or two. They'll be listed last. Everyone knows that first authorship is prime and that real estate worth goes down accordingly. I'd met one professor who threw out any papers where the grad school applicant hadn't made first or second author. Still, it was something for your c.v.

  Dahiyyah had gotten nothing. Nothing except slaving over pipettes.

  Would she really have killed herself ? And with cyanide? I know labs use cyanide, so it's relatively easy to obtain, but it's not the nicest way to go. They talk about the "cyanide scream," because the victim collapses with a cry. Sure, you might be unconscious for the shortness of breath/seizing/death part, and I don't think it's as consistently horrible as strychnine, but it still seemed like a hard way to go.

  I rubbed my eyes. Until we got more information on Dahiyyah's death, I was better off concentrating on Lawrence.

  One of Lawrence's first hits was that Ottawa University diversity video, which I ignored in favour of his considerable papers. He was third author on an Influenza A paper with Dr. Kanade. Pretty impressive.

  Joan texted me again. Can you call me, dr. hope?

  I glanced at Mitch, whose head was tucked over his laptop. I edged into the hallway and returned to the women's bathroom before I called her back. "Hi, Joan. What is it? Are you and Angella okay?"

  "She's fine, but Doctor Hope, the coroner called me. They did the autopsy. They think he was poisoned with cyanide."

  Chapter 41

  My blood congealed. My lips felt numb.

  Joan started crying, so it was hard to understand her, but she said, "Somebody beat him. He had bruises and internal injuries, and that bag on his head. They hurt him so badly, and they poisoned him, too!"

  "Wait a minute." My voice reverberated through the bathroom. I tried to whisper instead. "The autopsy showed that he was beaten and he died from cyanide poisoning?"

  "Yes, that's what they said. I had to call you, Doctor Hope. A nurse told me that another girl died from cyanide at the lab. What is going on, Doctor Hope?"

  So she'd heard about Dahiyyah. "I don't know." I was still trying to process what she'd told me. He'd been assaulted. That much, I'd figured out from the police report and the broken ribs, and Joan had confirmed it. But the cyanide was new. Had his blood tested positive first, so they had a high index of suspicion for Dahiyyah?

  Too many questions. So little time.

  The police had pointed out two persons of interest, the white guys wearing black. Did they beat him and give him cyanide? Or cyanide first, to make him easier to beat up?

  Cyanide and beating are two different ways of killing someone. Not that you can't murder someone in multiple ways, but it's overkill. If cyanide's going to do the job, why beat the guy up?

  Unless two different sets of people wanted Lawrence dead?

  Also, how was it possible that both Dahiyyah and Lawrence had taken cyanide?

  Mental vertigo.

  Joan blew her nose, pulling me back to the phone pressed against my ear. "I had to warn you, Doctor Hope. That lab is killing everyone."

  "I hear you, Joan. Thanks for the warning."

  "I'm scared. What's happening to us? What if they want to hurt me and Angella?"

  My breath puffed out. I hadn't considered that angle. "I don't think anyone can hurt her in the NICU. A nurse is there 24 hours a day." Angella would be under guard for the next few days or weeks, as they tried to help her gain weight and develop as normally as possible. "Are you admitted to the hospital for a few days?"

  "They said they would observe me for infection for at least 24 hours. They want to study us. Angella is only the second Zisa baby with microcephaly in all of Canada." Her voice trembled.

  "Stay there as long as you can." I made some rapid calculations. They'd be pressed for beds before Christmas, but she was right, they'd want to study the pair of them. She and Angella would be safer in a public space than sequestered in that crummy apartment.

  "We're holding a service for Lawrence and Baby Hope on Sunday at 2 p.m. Will you be able to come?"

  "Of course," I said. I would make it happen, even though I winced every time I heard Might II's official name. "I'll come and visit you after I'm done at the lab. Do you have people from your church visiting you?"

  "Yes, my friend Ruth is leaving now. I was doing skin-to-skin care with Angella when the police called."

  "Good for you, Joan. That's exactly the right thing to do. I want you to have as many friends around you as possible. I'll see you soon, okay, Joan?" I was saying her name over and over, like a telemarketer, but it was the only way I had to reassure her.

  "Yes." She didn't want to hang up, but she did.

  Even if Dahiyyah had killed herself, something was very wrong with this place. Two young scientists and one fragile baby had died before their time.

  I strode back into Tom's lab, ready to confront Mitch.

  Chapter 42

  Unfortunately, Mitch had slipped out in those few minutes I'd spent on the phone.

  To quote The Princess Bride: Inconceivable!

  I gnashed my teeth. I didn't have his number. I wished I'd forced him to join my Finding Friends app.

  Looking around, I belatedly realized that t
he Scoobies and even Samir had cleared out, leaving only Dr. Wen and Susan in the office. The lab itself was eerily silent, except for the hum of the shakers and the refrigerators.

  Mitch couldn't have heard about Lawrence's cyanide and beating, no matter how good his contacts. The police would first notify Lawrence's next of kin, Joan, and I was pretty sure she'd called me right away. It was a coincidence that Mitch had taken off as soon as I'd left the room.

  I texted Ryan to update him on the poison situation, but mostly, I was ready to fight.

  Since I had no one to engage in Mortal Kombat yet, I sat down at my computer and began researching white nationalists, starting with the site Ryan warned me to avoid, 14-88.com.

  Strange name, but as the website explained, a white supremacist terrorist named David Lane had made up a fourteen-word slogan: We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. Actually, he made up two of them. The second one was equally appealing/appalling: Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth.

  Eight-eight was a significant number. The eighth letter of the alphabet was H, so 88 means HH, or Heil Hitler.

  Something niggled in the back of my brain, and it wasn't the fact that eight is a lucky number in Chinese. I couldn't remember it right now, though, so I shoved that aside for the moment and dove into the website.

  It was set up like any website forum, if you normally go on sites with a red slogan on the top that says, We speak for the newly armed White minority! One thread, Introduce Yourself, had a bunch of sticky notes saying "Read This First." An activism section highlighted its latest post, "Join the Ku Klux Klan here."

  Although most of the posters were clustered under the Ideology section, there were subheadings for Science and Technology, Money and Investment, Creative Writing and Poetry, and even the Environment.

  Looking for Aryan love? Check out White Singles (latest post: "I <3 redheads").

  I scrolled down to the whole international section, headlined by 14-88 Europe, but also broken down by country, including Español y Portugués, Nederland & Vlaanderen, and Croatia. I was totally unsurprised to see South Africa, although how scary is that? Officially kidnapping, torturing, and murdering protesters under apartheid simply wasn't enough to satisfy them. I bypassed Australia and clicked on 14-88 Canada to survey the headlines.