The Stable Affair

by Jessica Andersen

  She directed the beam of the flashlight downward and stepped toward the two guilty-looking men. “Yeah, you should ask that when you sneak out of bed with me and go off on your own. What were you thinking? You don’t know your way around here, and you sure as hell don’t know what you’re looking for. Whose idiotic idea was it to leave me behind?”

  “Uh.”

  “Never mind. I’m here now. Let’s go around front and let ourselves in the easy way.”

  Daniel and Dante followed, looking suitably chastened. “What’s the easy way?”

  Sarah fished in her pocket and came up with a thin wafer. “With Jay’s spare key.” She slid the card into the locking slot and tapped in a six-digit code. The light above the lock changed from red to green, there was a faint click and the door swung gracefully inward, ushering them into the recycled air of BoGen’s GTU.

  An elderly guard slept deeply at the reception desk and Sarah ignored him as she spun the log to check who was signed in to work late. “That’s weird, most of the computer staff is signed out.”

  “Why is that weird?” Dante kept his voice low and his footsteps light as they made their way to a sterile bank of elevators off the lobby.

  “Gordon always made the computer people stagger their shifts so there was somebody on the premises if the system went down. Most of the equipment like the ultralow temp freezers and incubators and stuff are maintained through the network. If they lose power or temperature control, it could mean the ruin of millions of dollars worth of experiments and samples, so I’m surprised there’s nobody checked in to stay the night.”

  “That’s a good thing for us though, right?”

  Sarah looked back at Daniel as she led the way down another corridor that looked just the same as all the others they’d been down. “It depends on what you’re doing here. If your plan is sightseeing, then it shouldn’t matter whether the computer guys are in or not. If you were intending to break into The Doctor’s office, then be very, very glad the computer people aren’t here. His office and Jay’s old lab space are to my knowledge the only other areas that are wired directly to the network for security.”

  Dante had absolutely no idea where they were and was starting to realize just how stupid they’d been to exclude Sarah from their planned raid. Without her, they’d probably already be on their way to jail, or worse.

  He’d just been trying to keep her safe.

  She used the card and the same code to get them through the next two sets of doors, then paused and laid her hand on a door marked “Sherri Dumont - Counselor.” “This was my office.” She stood there a moment before turning away. “There won’t be anything of interest in there, I took all my stuff when I left.”

  “Where’s Seville’s office? Will that same code get you in?” Daniel had moved to her elbow and was obviously twitching to get started.

  “Down this corridor, and I’m not quite sure. Jay made this card for me so I could get in to visit him after hours. Only certain people were allowed access then and I wasn’t one of them. Jay liked for me to bring him dinner and keep him company now and then when he was waiting for experimental runs to finish, so he set me up with a duplicate of his passkey. To be honest, I’m a little surprised they haven’t disabled his codes by now, it’s been almost two years.”

  They reached a heavy steel door that was unmarked. “This is his office, behind here.” She tried the card and the code, but the light remained red. “Damn, he must have a private code. Wait a minute! He did have a private code…” She thought hard and tried to remember the conversation she’d once half overheard between Gordon and Jay when The Doctor hadn’t realized she was still in the building.

  “My code is the symbol for everything that I am not,” Gordon had laughed, “It’s the number for genetic purity.”

  She began to mutter to herself as Daniel and Dante waited anxiously. “Genetic purity. Not interbreeding—a Hardy Weinberg equation? No, they had been talking about preparing DNA from pellets, so it must have been something to do with the purity of a sample. Optical Density readings? Of course!” She slid the card through again and typed a new six-digit code.

  The light turned green and the door clicked open. Daniel hustled in and Dante paused at the door. “What was the code?”

  “A number that represents the absorption wavelength of DNA compared to that of RNA. It’s how we could tell if a DNA sample was relatively pure of contamination that would interfere with our techniques.”

  Dante just shook his head. They were really idiots to have thought they could do this without Sarah’s help.

  Inside the huge office, Daniel was already rifling through Gordon’s file cabinets. “It’s all grant stuff and old papers,” he complained.

  “What’d you think? That he would have a big, thick folder on his desk marked ‘Susan St. Pierre

  ’? Give the guy a little credit here.” Sarah crouched on her hands and knees and started peering at the underside of the mahogany desk.

  Dante hunkered down beside her. “What are you doing?”

  Sarah replied as she searched, “I became somewhat friendly with a secretary of Gordon’s. She was so unlike me and I so unlike her that we enjoyed chatting and comparing our days. Part of her job was to… er… service Gordon a few times a week, usually when he was on the phone with big corporations. I guess talking to such important businessmen… excited him.”

  Dante could tell Sarah was blushing as she started pulling drawers out of the way. “Go on, this is interesting if not totally relevant to our current problems.”

  “It’s very relevant. She said that one day as she was… um… performing on him that her head bumped against something under the desk and Gordon started swearing. He was on the phone with his pants down around his ankles, so he wasn’t really in any position to undo what she’d done and she saw that a part of the wall had swung away… Aha!” Sarah pressed a plastic tab that was designed to look like part of a desk drawer.

  Daniel yelped a bit as six feet or so of bookcase slid sideways into the wet bar, revealing another series of filing cabinets and a small computer.

  “Cool!” Dante peered at the mechanism while Daniel started checking the files.

  “Lucky for us he must’ve figured the hidden panel was security enough that he didn’t have to install another set of weird locks on these things. Here we go!” Daniel pulled a thick folder from the drawer marked ‘S’ and peeked inside. “Uh. Dante, why don’t you keep an eye on the corridor and make sure we’re not going to have any company?”

  Dante wasn’t stupid. “Why? What do you have there?” He tried to look in the folder and Sarah grabbed it and flipped it open before Daniel could stop her.

  A series of photographs, CAT scans, MRIs and lab reports spilled to the floor. One photograph lay face up on the top of the pile. It showed a dark-haired woman lying naked on a gray slab.

  Dante gagged and stepped back. “I’ll go watch the corridor.”

  Sarah stared at the picture, horribly fascinated. “Susan.”

  Daniel knelt to gather the pages. “Yeah. This looks like most of her autopsy report, plus her testing results. Can you look through this stuff and tell me if anything looks weird?”

  Sarah took a deep breath and accepted the folder. “Okay. I’ll try, but remember, I’m not a doctor.”

  Daniel just grunted and flipped through a few more drawers. “No folder for Fontaine, or for Taylor. Your stuff must be on this zippy little thing.” He sat down at the computer and snapped it on. “Arrogant bastard didn’t put any locks on this either. Yippee.”

  Sarah immediately passed over the autopsy photographs and put them in a pile, face down. She preferred to remember Susan as she had lived, not as she had died. Sarah then shuffled through the various scans, looking for a summary report that was written more or less in English. Instead she came across two familiar sheets of printout. “Hey!”

  Daniel and Dante came to her side immediately. “What have you got?”


  “Two Huntington’s tests with different results: one positive for HD and one negative.” She scanned the identifiers at the top of the sheets. “Strangely enough, they both seem to have been correctly done on the same person at different times. That’s weird.”

  “Take ’em with you,” Daniel ordered as he returned to the computer, and Sarah folded the pages and stuffed them in her pocket.

  Finally she uncovered the report she’d been seeking: the medical examiner’s summary of Susan’s autopsy. She read halfway down before she stopped and let out a low whistle. “Gliomas?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I’ll explain when we get out of here.” The back of Sarah’s neck was beginning to itch, telling her that their time was running short. “If the next shift of computer guys is on schedule, they’ll be here in twenty minutes. We should finish up.”

  Dante shook his head. “But we haven’t gotten into Fontaine’s lab yet.”

  “I don’t think we have the time. Daniel, what have you got over there?” Sarah reassembled the folder without the pages she had taken and returned it to the cabinet.

  “Um. I’m not sure. I think it’s a fragment of a letter.”

  “We’ve got to go. Can you print it out?”

  “There’s no printer here and I’m not sure I want to send it anywhere by email. Do you know something called ‘Almost Noble’?”

  Sarah was at his side in an instant. “Yes. That’s the name of my horse, the big gray one I rode last week. Where did you see the phrase?”

  Daniel backed the screen up a few lines. “Here, the message begins in the middle with ‘…and behind an Almost Noble leap of faith lies the knowledge that I need to pass on. I wish to be seen not as a corporate whore but as a scientist who wanted to make the world better. I hope only that my own mistaken judgment will not cause you pain, and I want you to know that in my own way…” Daniel stopped. “There’s no more, not even an identifier.”

  “No need.” Sarah took a deep breath. “It was from Jay to me. He always used to say ‘in my own way I do love you’, when I’d complain that he didn’t act like a normal boyfriend or fiancé.”

  “Do you recognize the letter?”

  Sarah shook her head. “No. I never got it. Either Jay decided not to send it to me, or it was intercepted after he died.”

  “Do you have any idea what it means?”

  Sarah started to reply in the negative when she was interrupted by Dante’s sudden hiss. The three fell silent and Dante eased the heavy door shut. He mouthed, “Someone’s coming.”

  Daniel powered the computer down and Sarah pressed the plastic bar again, breathing a sigh of relief when the wall slid shut again. She had been a bit nervous that a different signal might be required to close the thing.

  “Okay. Coast is clear.” Dante checked the hall again and they eased out of Seville’s lair. As they snuck to the elevator, Dante paused. “If there are people here now they’ll see the elevator moving. Should we take the stairs?”

  The sound of footsteps coming toward them down the hall made the question a more pressing issue. Sarah shook her head in the negative. “Nope. We bluff. Act arrogant, both of you.” She pulled her shoulders back and tucked the key card in her back pocket as a heavy-eyed man in his early twenties came around the corner tucking his T-shirt into his scrubby blue jeans. Sarah completely ignored the man as she glared directly at Dante. “I can’t believe Seville wasn’t here to meet us. I specifically told him we were coming after night shift to get those results on the Johnson baby, and he said he’d be here.”

  The technician took one look at the trio of irritated physicians, turned right around, and headed back the way he’d come. The elevator arrived with a ding and the three entered the car.

  “What just happened?”

  Sarah grinned at the perplexed men. “Survival instinct. When you’ve been yelled at by The Doctor, you tend to develop a healthy fear of those involved in the medical profession. The poor guy probably thought we’d ask him to pull up the Johnson baby’s test results, which he’s not allowed to do without Gordon’s permission. Then he’d have three irate doctors here and one angry boss when he called at five in the morning to get authorization to release the information. It was in his best interest to beat a quick retreat.”

  They passed several other technicians in the halls, all of who studiously ignored the three loudly complaining pseudo-physicians.

  Back at the hotel they gathered in Daniel’s room to talk over what they’d found.

  “Okay. We know Seville is in this up to his neck, right?” Dante looked around and the others nodded agreement. “And that letter Daniel found seems to suggest that Fontaine knew something was going on. Did you get what he was talking about, Sarah?”

  Sarah was subdued, had been quiet since they left the lab. It was hard for her to believe that so much had been happening without her knowledge. How could she have been so blind?

  “Sarah?”

  She started. “I’m sorry. I didn’t really understand it all, but the fact that he capitalized Almost Noble seems significant, as does the way he was writing. He wasn’t one for poetry, ever. I think he was trying to send me a message, but I’m not sure what it means. ‘Behind an Almost Noble leap of faith’? I have no idea. I’m sorry.”

  She swayed tiredly and Dante put an arm around her shoulders. “We’re all tired. Maybe we should head back to bed and look at this stuff again tomorrow, okay?”

  He was almost forced to carry Sarah back to their room and she was quiet as they undressed for bed. He thought she was just tired, but when they lay together in the dark, curled around each other in reassurance, Dante knew that she wasn’t sleeping.

  “Sarah, what is it?” He rubbed his hand over her back soothingly. It had torn him to pieces to see Susan’s autopsy photograph lying on the floor, but he could only imagine how she was feeling about the shambles that had been made of her life in the name of scientific progress.

  “Gliomas,” she replied softly. “Susan had gliomas.”

  Dante remembered her saying the word earlier. “What does that mean?”

  Sarah shifted, her shapely bottom pressing familiarly against him and giving rise to some ideas on how they might spend the remaining hours of the night. “Brain tumors. Susan had brain tumors, lots of them, and they weren’t there a month before her death.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Brain tumors? Is that common for a woman her age?” Daniel shoved a buttered roll in his mouth while Sarah stared into her coffee.

  “Not really, although it isn’t unheard of. What is strange is how quickly they came on. Susan had been in a fender bender about a month before she came in for testing, and they’d done some brain imaging just to rule out head injury. She told me about it when we did our pre-testing counseling session. The tumors should’ve shown up then.”

  “What did the autopsy list as cause of death? The tumors?”

  Sarah shook her head and pulled the crumpled paper from her pocket. “No. It says there was a lethal level of barbiturates in her blood—that’s why it was ruled suicide, especially since there was no obvious sign of forced entry, nor was there any obvious motive for killing her.”

  Dante turned tired eyes to Daniel. “Can you find out how hard the cops looked for signs of foul play? They might not have tried too hard if they had no reason to suspect murder.”

  Daniel polished off his breakfast, slurped down the remainder of his coffee, and rose. “I’ll do that today. Are you two headed back to the farm?”

  Dante nodded. “Later today. I really do have some paperwork to file at the court,” he looked at a pale, wan Sarah. “Then I thought we might bum around Boston for a bit, maybe do some sightseeing.” He didn’t want her alone at the farm where Seville would know where to find her.

  “Okay. I promised Tilda I’d be back tonight to pack for Grosvenor Farms. We’re supposed to leave the day after tomorrow with the horses.” It was nearing the end of the show season
now, and the horses and riders were traveling almost weekly to the big shows to get those last few points to qualify for Indoors.

  While Dante filed the papers that would make Ellie legally his, Sarah called the farm to make sure the horses had all gotten home okay after Capeside and that there hadn’t been any weird happenings while she was gone.

  “Tilda said that Matt stopped by the day before yesterday, which is odd. He knew I’d still be at the show.” Dante’s head came up at that, but Sarah continued her recitation. “The construction guys finished repairing the shed row and Noble moved into his new house with no problem. Bob sounded irked about something, but that’s Tilda’s problem not mine.”

  Dante had planned on keeping their day as light as he could until they got back to the farm, at which point they would have to talk about the fact that Ellie’s name was being changed from St. Pierre to Devers. “Are those two a couple or what?”

  She laughed. “That’s the twenty-five thousand dollar question. I used to think so, but lately I’ve decided they’re not. Bob wouldn’t be so grumpy and they wouldn’t fight all the time if they were… uh… you know.”

  “Oh. Is that why we used to fight all the time?”

  “No, that’s just because you were a jerk.”

  “So I’m less of a jerk now?”

  She laughed again, conceding the point. “No, but all the sex has me way too mellow to take offense.” She stood and reached a hand down for his. “Come on. They’re not expecting me back at the farm until tonight. I’ll buy you lunch at the Brown Derby.”

  They walked hand in hand through the older sections of Boston, down cobbled streets and through narrow alleys. Sarah obviously knew her way around, and Dante was content to be led as he kept a quiet eye on the people that passed them.

  They traveled a portion of the Freedom Trail, leaving it briefly to watch the harbor seals that bobbed cheerfully in their pool in front of the New England Aquarium.

  Sarah knew each by name and told him they were all rescued animals that had been too seriously injured to return to the wild, which made him feel better about their captivity. He hadn’t worried about the seals particularly the last time he had been at the Aquarium, he had been too busy attempting to help herd what seemed like a hundred screaming six-year olds into a line. They’d only lost one, which Dante had thought was a pretty good job although the teacher in charge hadn’t been inclined to agree.