Kill Switch

by Neal Baer

“The ME looked for cyanide during the autopsies and didn’t find any,” Claire said. “It must be some other lab reagent or chemical he uses in his research.”

  Nick peeked over her shoulder at the screen. “He’s on the faculty at Yale School of Medicine?” he asked.

  Claire opened the link. “No, he attended Yale and just gave a talk there,” she corrected.

  “What about?”

  “Apoptosis,” Claire said, trying to skim.

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “Programmed cell death,” she explained, looking up at him. “The average adult loses between fifty and seventy billion cells every day.”

  “Billion?”

  “They’re replenished. It’s a normal process by which the body eliminates stressed or damaged cells. When it’s not working properly, mutated cells can become cancerous.”

  “Okay, but what does this have to do with this mess we’re in?”

  Claire turned back to the computer. “Sedgwick’s talk was about a breakthrough in cancer pharmacology. For years we’ve been killing tumors with chemotherapy, which is basically a poison that also kills healthy cells. If a way could be found to stimulate apoptosis to kill cancerous cells . . .” She looked up at Nick. “My God, that’s it.”

  “Please, Claire,” Nick begged. “Remember, I’m not a doctor.”

  “I think Sedgwick’s looking for a drug that will turn on apoptosis in cancer cells to make tumors literally kill themselves.”

  “I hope this has something to do with the bitter almonds.”

  Claire scanned the citations and found the article she was looking for.

  “It does. He uses a chemical called dithiothreitol to separate and isolate the proteins in the cancer cells,” she said with excitement growing in her voice. “Dithiothreitol has a bitter almond smell.”

  Nick thought he had the answer. “Maybe Quimby worked alone after all,” he suggested. “Follow me here. Tammy Sorenson worked with Sedgwick in the lab. So it makes sense she’d smell of something bitter, too, right?”

  “Go on,” Claire urged.

  “And it would make sense that in manipulating and dressing her corpse, the bitter odor could transfer to Quimby.”

  “Yes,” Claire said, eager to hear more.

  “Okay. Tammy was the fourth victim we found, but according to her autopsy, she was the third woman murdered. The medical examiner said Quimby probably kept Tammy on ice or refrigerated her for two days before he dumped her on the ball field.”

  “I’m with you,” Claire said.

  “What if Ross was off by a day?” Nick asked, referring to the medical examiner, “and Tammy was actually the first woman Quimby murdered?”

  Claire considered this. “It would explain how Quimby transferred the bitter smell to the other women because he would’ve still been in contact with Tammy and her clothing.”

  “And it sure as hell wouldn’t be the first time Ross screwed up,” Nick observed.

  They looked at each other. There was a piece missing. And they both knew what it was.

  “Quimby lived with his grandmother,” Claire said. “I doubt he kept Tammy’s body there for three minutes, let alone three days.”

  “We never looked for where he might’ve stashed her because we thought we broke the case,” Nick replied. “We’ll have to look now.”

  But the whole scenario was beginning to bother Claire. “I thought I knew Todd Quimby inside and out. I always believed he murdered these women because he couldn’t control his impulses. Hiding a dead body for three days doesn’t fit his profile.”

  “Maybe your profile is wrong,” Nick suggested halfheartedly.

  “It’s more like our theory of the crime is wrong,” Claire answered. “Maybe Quimby was hired to kill these women.”

  “Hired?” Nick asked, flabbergasted. “For what reason?”

  “To cover up what they were really doing to Tammy Sorenson.”

  “By ‘they,’ I assume you mean Sedgwick. And what do you think they were doing?”

  Claire pointed to the computer screen and highlighted the word apoptosis. “Tammy had a virulent form of lymphoma. We know that Sedgwick is doing research on how to turn off cancer cells—but what if he somehow found a way to turn them on?”

  Nick stared at her, blinking. “Are you saying he used Tammy as a human guinea pig?”

  “I don’t know,” Claire answered. “Maybe Tammy went to him when she discovered she was sick—he’s a cancer expert—and his new treatment went awry, making her lymphoma so aggressive it couldn’t be stopped.”

  Nick turned to Claire, his pulse racing. “If Sedgwick somehow made Tammy sicker, he’d want to cover it up, right?”

  Claire nodded. “He’d lose everything—all of Biopharix—if any of this came out.”

  “So what if he hired someone to murder four other women so we’d think a serial killer got her?”

  “Are you saying he hired Quimby?” Claire asked, astonished. “Do you have any idea how crazy that sounds?”

  “It would explain the connection between Quimby and Sedgwick, and why they both had the smell from that chemical.”

  “If Sedgwick hired Quimby . . .” Claire didn’t finish as she riffled through Tammy’s case file. She pulled out two DVDs, labeled Surveillance video from Red. “These are from the nightclub the evening Tammy was killed, right?” she asked.

  “It’s presumably of Quimby using Tammy’s credit cards,” Nick answered.

  “Have you watched it yet?”

  “No. Quimby was dead before I even got it.”

  Claire looked around the room. “There’s a TV but no DVD player.”

  “You want to look at it now?”

  “If Quimby’s on here, I need to see him,” she insisted.

  Nick sighed. “I’m going home to change. I’ll pick you up in an hour,” he said, pulling out his cell phone.

  One Police Plaza, the NYPD’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan, was built in the early 1970s in the architectural style of brutalism, which several generations of cops had derisively joked was exactly what one usually endured simply by entering the building.

  It was also the last place Nick wanted to be seen, since he was officially on vacation and had already been there once today to receive his promotion. But the department’s Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) maintained a state-of-the-art video lab there, and so a friend of Nick’s had agreed to meet him and Claire a block away and spirit them in through the building’s subterranean garage.

  “So nobody knows we were there,” Nick had told Claire.

  The friend was Detective Tom Mahoney. He’d worked with Nick on numerous cases, and Nick had gone the extra mile for him once when Mahoney’s teenaged daughter had disappeared into the clutches of a religious fringe cult. Nick had done the extraction and intervention himself, and the daughter was now grown up and married to an investment banker with whom she had two young children and an enormous house in Westchester County. Tom Mahoney would’ve parted the Red Sea if Nick Lawler asked him to.

  “That’s all you want?” Mahoney asked, almost disappointed as he fired up the equipment in the video lab. “To play a friggin’ DVD?”

  “We may need you to work some of your magic, depending on what we see,” Nick assured him. “Hit it.”

  Mahoney clicked the mouse on the computer-driven apparatus. On a large monitor appeared the view from four separate cameras covering the club. One of those cameras pointed out from the bar, and Nick now gestured to that video.

  “Any way to isolate the bar patrons?” he asked.

  “Easy,” Mahoney said, maneuvering the mouse like a maestro until the bar video filled the entire screen.

  “Great,” said Nick. “Now run it at double speed.”

  Mahoney obeyed. It took just a few seconds until—

  “There!” Claire shouted, pointing to the screen. “There he is.”

  “Play it normally and blow it up if you can,” Nick said.

  “You
got it,” Mahoney said, enhancing the image until Quimby became visible.

  “What the hell’s wrong with him?” Nick asked.

  He was referring to Quimby’s gait. He was walking unsteadily toward the bar.

  “Looks like he’s drunk,” Mahoney offered.

  “He hasn’t even ordered a drink yet,” Nick replied.

  “Hold on,” Claire said. “Can you freeze the video once he reaches the bar?”

  “Sure,” said Mahoney, doing so.

  “How closely can you zoom in on his eyes?” asked Claire.

  Mahoney maneuvered the mouse. The image was grainy. A few more mouse clicks and the picture began to clear up. Finally, it revealed what she suspected.

  “His pupils are dilated.”

  “You think he did some drugs before he went over there?” Nick asked.

  “Or someone drugged him to make him go.”

  Mahoney looked up at Nick. “What the hell’s she talking about?” he asked.

  “You didn’t hear anything we said,” Nick said to him.

  “I never knew you were here,” Mahoney answered.

  Nick turned to Claire, to make sure he heard her right. “You’re suggesting that Quimby was forcibly drugged and made to go to this club just to use Tammy Sorenson’s credit card? Why?”

  “To establish him as her killer.”

  “It that even possible? To make someone do something against his will by drugging him?”

  “Who knows what someone as talented as Sedgwick can whip up in a pharmacology lab?” Claire said.

  Nick shook his head, pulled out his cell.

  “Who are you calling?” Claire asked.

  “The medical examiner,” answered Nick as he dialed. “We’re going to settle this once and for all.”

  An hour later, Nick and Claire walked into the morgue. ME Ross was waiting for them at the door. “Well?” Nick asked.

  Ross gestured them down the hallway, and they walked beside him. “You were right, Lawler. Guess I goofed again.”

  “Quimby had some kind of strange drug in his system?” Nick asked.

  “Oh, I won’t know that for another two days,” answered Ross as he escorted them into the spacious laboratory. “But when I filleted Quimby on the table, something bothered me.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” Nick asked.

  “Because I wasn’t sure,” Ross replied, sounding apologetic for the first time. “I wanted to get the lab results back first.”

  “Hold on,” Nick said. “What lab results?”

  “From the water Quimby drowned in,” Ross said. “They came back last week, but my assistant forgot to tell me—and I forgot to check.”

  “What did you find?” Claire asked. “That was such a goof.”

  “I’m a scientist. I shouldn’t be assuming a goddamned thing. But I assumed Todd Quimby drowned in the East River where his car went in.”

  Claire looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “You were there with us when they pulled him out of the East River. You can’t be saying he didn’t drown there.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. There’s no way he drowned in that river,” Ross maintained.

  “How is that even possible?” Claire asked.

  “Because Quimby’s lungs were filled with fresh water.”

  “Rivers are by definition bodies of fresh water,” Claire replied.

  “Not the East River,” Ross informed her. “It’s a tidal strait that connects the Long Island Sound to New York Harbor. Which means the water that runs through it—”

  “Is salt water,” Claire realized, shocked. “Quimby’s lungs should’ve been filled with salt water.”

  “And salt water in the lungs pulls water out of cells by osmosis. Quimby’s lungs should have had shrunken blood cells, but instead, they, had burst,” Ross said. “That’s why I sent water samples to the lab. I knew something was off.”

  “Which means,” Nick concluded, “he was drowned somewhere else. The guy had to have been dead when he was put in the car.”

  “Exactly,” Ross said. “I’m changing his manner of death to homicide.”

  “Do you have any idea where Quimby might’ve drowned?” Nick asked, shocked by what he’d just heard.

  “Off the top of my head? The organisms in the water from his lungs look like those we find in floaters we pull out of the Hudson River. How far upstream he went in will take me longer, like a week.”

  “Thanks, Doctor,” Claire said. “We’ll be waiting for your results.”

  “I’ll get them to you as soon as I have them,” Ross returned, still embarrassed. “And this time I won’t forget to call.”

  “C’mon,” said Claire, pulling Nick, who was too stunned to move, toward the double doors. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Nick followed Claire out to the corridor.

  “What the hell was that about?” he demanded.

  “We don’t need his results,” Claire said. “Biopharix’s headquarters is right on the Hudson River. Quimby was drowned there and put in his grandmother’s car—”

  “If that’s true,” Nick argued, “who killed Maggie Stolls? Who tried to kill you in the safe house? And who drove the goddamned car?”

  “Sedgwick.”

  Nick stopped. This was more than he could handle.

  “So let me get this straight. Sedgwick, the nerdy doc, murders a cop, tries to take you out, drives Quimby’s grandmother’s piece-of-crap Buick like Steve McQueen down the FDR Drive, and sends it into the East River. And then, only when the car is in the drink, does he put Quimby behind the wheel and make his escape. Alive.”

  “It’s just a hypothesis,” conceded Claire. “I admit, it’s out there.”

  “Are you serious?” exclaimed Nick. “I try to sell that to my boss and he’ll ship us off to the funny farm.”

  “Wait a minute,” Claire realized. “How the hell does a high roller like Charles Sedgwick find a nobody like Todd Quimby in the first place?”

  “That’s the best question yet,” Nick said. “And I know just the high roller to ask.”

  CHAPTER 27

  It was just before eight p.m. when Claire and Nick climbed the few steps of a magnificent, pre–World War II apartment building on Central Park West in the Seventies. The summer sun was beginning to set, casting a golden glaze that backlit the edges of the cut stone exterior. The address was one of the most sought after in Manhattan, with a grand marble lobby that made Claire wonder how Curtin managed to parlay a career studying the criminal mind into a life of such wealth and luxury.

  She knew that her mentor, unlike many medical academicians, served on no boards of pharmaceutical companies that manufactured psychotropic drugs, despite having been invited numerous times. He always avoided even a whiff of a conflict of interest. “I can’t take the chance some ‘paragon of justice’ will throw that in my face when I’m testifying for the prosecution,” was the answer he always gave potential suitors.

  They walked up to the front desk, where the doorman, a trim black man in his thirties, eyed them. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “Claire Waters and Nick Lawler. We’re here to see Mr. Larciano,” she said, using the pseudonym Curtin always gave his visitors. “You never know when a patient might make a surprise house call,” he would warn his students, conceding their profession wasn’t for the faint of heart and carried with it an element of risk and even danger, and urging them to protect their privacy and families at all costs. Claire’s predecessors in the fellowship told her this warning came near the end of the program, when Curtin usually became more the father figure and less the tormentor to his flock.

  Too bad he didn’t warn us at the beginning, she thought. Maybe Quimby wouldn’t have phoned me that night or known where I lived.

  “He’s expecting you,” the doorman said, not even looking at his list. “Apartment Five A. Down the right hallway, elevator’s on your left.”

  Claire followed Nick down the hall. He pushed the elev
ator call button, causing the doors to open. They rode silently in the tiny car to the fifth floor and stepped out onto a spacious landing, flanked on either side with the doors of two apartments.

  “Wow, being a shrink buys him a place like this?” Nick asked.

  Claire pushed the doorbell. “He also sold a lot of books,” she said, as if that explained it. “Believe me, we don’t all live high on the hog.”

  She heard the door unlock. It opened, revealing Curtin in a blue silk bathrobe that seemed at least two sizes too large. She tried her best to maintain a poker face, even smiling at him, though she was shocked.

  The Paul Curtin standing before her was a shell of the man she had left behind a few weeks ago. “Thanks for seeing us, Doctor,” she managed.

  “Claire. Detective Lawler. Please, come in,” he invited, his voice raspy.

  They entered the spacious apartment, and Claire took stock of her mentor. The once-fit triathlete walked stiffly, as if suddenly stricken with a horrible bout of arthritis. His usually neat, wavy silver hair was unkempt and had lost its sheen, and his face was a forest of stubble. Clearly the flu had overwhelmed him.

  “Are you feeling any better?” Nick asked him.

  “Yes, thank you, despite how I look—and I appreciate your being so polite,” he said, ushering them into the maple-paneled living room. He looked at Claire. “I do feel better. But unfortunately, it turns out I have mononucleosis.” He sat down on a dark blue couch, facing two upholstered foam green chairs. Claire realized then that the room was decorated in colors of the ocean. “Imagine,” said Curtin, “a guy my age getting a disease we typically see only in teenagers.”

  “You must have kissed the wrong girl,” Nick said, managing a smile.

  “I wish,” Curtin responded. “But it’s not just ‘the kissing disease.’ You can also get mono casually—from a water fountain or, in my case, probably some fork or spoon in our cafeteria that wasn’t washed properly.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” Nick said.

  “You should get plenty of rest,” Claire said to Curtin. “We won’t stay long.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Curtin said. “I appreciate the advice.” He sat back on the couch, the pain evident on his face. “Now, then,” he said, recovering quickly, “what’s so important that you had to see me?”