Murder Is Pathological

by P. M. Carlson

  Weisen himself might, of course. But he wouldn’t have done it this way. First of all, if he’d been interested in the question, he could easily have done it as part of his whole design. Why do it secretly in the old lab? Secondly, the dosages and length of time for his experiment had been laboriously calculated after extensive small pilot studies over the last two years. His estimates had been vindicated; the results of the middle and last experiments were so spectacular, in terms of tumor reduction, that giving larger amounts would be pointless, especially since the possibility of greater kidney damage was clear even from the existing studies. Federal law would require the drug companies to report on the lethal dose before they could market it, but the companies would expect to do that work themselves, along with many other required steps. Those studies were not Weisen’s responsibility. There was no reason for him to have done them at all, much less secretly.

  Les, then? She tried to think of his situation objectively. It was possible, wasn’t it? The Brighton people may well have wanted more than just descriptions of Weisen’s experiment. They may have wanted further figures, maybe a pilot for the lethal-dose studies. Or they may have wanted larger doses to discredit Weisen’s work and reduce the cost of the patent. If so, it hadn’t worked. And why not do it themselves? If Les could steal paramustine to administer to the secret rats, he could steal it to smuggle to Brighton representatives. Still, Monica had to admit that Les could well have been responsible for the secret study.

  Of course, if Les had been bribed by a drug company, it was possible that someone else had been too. Tom? Barbara? Probably not Martin; he was around so little these days. Still, he would have that much more opportunity to enter the old lab secretly. Not Rick; he had come too recently to do the whole long study. He was out. But Gib, like Les and Tom and Barbara, spent hours at the lab. And he would have found it easy to raid young rats from the breeding colony, easier than the others to get a copy of the key to the old lab. He seemed very loyal to Dr. Weisen, but then—like all of them—he might have been reluctant to see Dr. Weisen leave. He might have been motivated to prevent it however he could. Or he too might have been paid by a drug company. And hadn’t someone said his son needed money?

  Or Maggie. Monica considered Maggie. She was not at the lab for long stretches of time, but she was a regular visitor, in on the details of Weisen’s work, the first to know whether a given experiment was statistically significant or not. She was Monica’s friend. Wise, sympathetic, loyal, angry only when she thought Monica had been lying to her. Okay. She had been Norman’s friend too. She’d do a lot to revenge a friend. That was why she was nosing around the lab, stealing equipment, disabling incinerators, who knew what other appalling things. But if she could do all that, she could run a secret experiment if she wanted to. Could she be bribed? Could she have learned the necessary lab skills somewhere? Cervical dislocation and the use of a biopsy needle wouldn’t be hard to learn. But she would have had to implant the tumors and administer the correct dose of paramustine too. A big job for someone who spent so much time on statistics, music, gymnastics. And would she betray Weisen’s work to a drug company? No, screamed Monica’s heart. But Monica’s head realized that Maggie had no particular ties to Weisen. And in addition to the money, stopping Weisen’s departure would help people she did care about. Like Monica.

  The car Rick had seen had been dark, of course. Like Monica’s and Tom’s and Gib’s. Not a rusty finned blue-and-white car like Maggie’s.

  And why in the world would she have dumped all this evidence in Monica’s lap, if she was guilty?

  No, not Maggie. That explanation was too fantastic even for these fantastic circumstances.

  Back to the evidence, then. There was something she hadn’t considered yet, those sixteen rats with notched ears. At least two duplicated the numbers of the rats actually in Weisen’s experiment, if her memory was correct. That was odd. Why would the numbers be duplicates? If you were running a secret experiment to show the effect of higher dosages, why bother to notch some of your rats to match the ones treated with lower dosages in the publicized experiment?

  When the answer occurred to her, the situation underwent a Gestalt shift, like a Necker cube design flipping its orientation. Monica was gripped by sudden certainty. These rats were not in a separate experiment. They were to be substituted for Weisen’s rats. All the biochemical tests would come out correctly, all the information on tumors and even type of kidney damage would be irreproachably similar to Weisen’s, except that the kidney damage would be far more extensive. That must be the answer. Biopsy the kidneys, choose the ones with the most extensive renal damage, notch the ears appropriately, and substitute them for those in the real experiment. It would be almost impossible to tell the difference. Weisen and his students would use all their safeguards—ear-notch numbers, careful double-checking as the left kidneys were labeled—and would never know they were actually examining substitute rats from the old lab. With eighty-nine rats to choose among, the meddler could easily warp the statistics on kidney damage, making the incidence seem much higher than in the actual experiment.

  And—Monica was excited now, things were falling into place—this idea could explain the slaughters too, couldn’t it? Suppose the meddler didn’t have enough rats to substitute damaged ones for healthy ones in all the experiments. Or suppose he hadn’t started soon enough for the rats to develop much damage. Simply destroy two of the scheduled studies, and the task was more reasonable. Leave the earliest set alone, substitute what he could for the middle set, and by the end, with the doses he was using, he could have a lot of very sick rats. It would give a very convincing illusion of increasing kidney damage with increasing doses, making paramustine far less desirable as an antitumor agent. Far less likely to be sold at a high price.

  There was one problem with this theory, though, she thought. The animals she had just examined had more serious kidney damage than the ones she and Barbara had been checking. She reviewed her notes; yes, the two here whose ear-notch numbers she remembered were in far worse shape than any she had looked at in the lab. Why hadn’t they been used to discredit Weisen’s drug?

  Why bother with the whole elaborate setup if you weren’t going to use them?

  Well, maybe they were supposed to be used, but something had happened. The guard? Maybe the hiring of an armed guard had scared the person. He was a tough guard; he’d shot at Maggie. That made sense.

  The whole thing made sense now. This theory explained the secrecy and the slaughters, the reasons for the preliminary biopsy of the hidden rats, the notching of some of the ears in preparation for substitution. Only the unexpected addition of Murph had prevented the substitution of these notched, prepared animals for the true experimental rats.

  Okay. What should her next step be? She couldn’t consult with Maggie, who had gone back to the lab, taking Zelle along for the ride so that Monica and, more importantly, these dead rats would not be disturbed by the little dog. Obviously, the police must be told, but she would have to go with Maggie to do that too. She didn’t know where the rats had been found, and her story would be too insane to be believed without some corroboration. It would also be useful to have the numbers of the rats that had been analyzed in the last experiment, to be sure that her hunch about the duplicate numbers was correct. She could check those. But she would stop worrying about who it was. The police could check on that. Even Maggie was willing to go talk to them tomorrow. And the disruptions of the lab’s work by the officers would not be as inconvenient now that Weisen’s offer from the pharmaceutical companies was safe.

  Except that it wasn’t, she realized with a sudden sinking behind her breastbone. If she, Monica, publicized the possibility that some of the rats in Weisen’s experiments were substitutes, the logic of the whole experiment collapsed. No one would—or should—believe the results. Telling about this problem would snatch his hard-won prize away. The vandal would be the victor after all.

  And, chimed in a litt
le unbidden part of her mind, Weisen might have to stay after all.

  Look, Ma, no morals.

  Damn.

  She had to talk to Maggie. Right away. She picked up the room key, relocked the door behind her to guard against the possibility that Mary Beth or Sue might look in and receive the shock of a lifetime, and hurried out to her car.

  XIV

  The blackness came in thick oily waves, impossible for him to resist. There would be a moment, not of clarity, but at least of sensation—of rough fabric, say, and motion—and then the blackness again. Or, later, an instant of brightness. Rubber-rimmed wheels on tile. And then the dark wave would overwhelm him. Or, again, heavy breathing, someone out of breath, close, someone pushing his eyelid up. To see if he was alive? But the blackness closed down again and he could not let him know that he was awake, because he wasn’t anymore.

  Finally the blackness rolled back a little, hesitated, did not come back but stayed nearby, rimming his small wavering consciousness. Nick became aware of pain first, pain in the back of his head. He lay quiet, waiting for the darkness to rescue him again; but it remained still, out at the edges. He noticed that his eyes were a little bit open. Something was wrong with them; they weren’t seeing anything. The world seemed smooth, shiny, in a dim light. No roughness, no texture of sand or fabric or grass or carpet. Not even the geometry of tile. Just a smooth, seamless, silvery world. Maybe he was going blind.

  Then suddenly there was something else. Shoes, trouser legs, stepping into his vision. He could feel the jar of the steps too, in his cheek and hip. He had a thought. I am lying on the floor. What floor? A cold steel floor. The shoes, black shoes, went away again. His head went on aching.

  After a while another thought arrived. If the shoes come back, maybe it will be a person who will help me. This seemed to be an important thought. He focused on it, and the pain intensified but the blackness rolled further back. He needed help. Okay. He was lying on a cold steel floor, and he needed help. His head hurt. Could he get up? He moved his arm under him to push himself up, and found that his arm would not move far. Something was binding it. Both his hands were bound behind him. He tried moving a leg, and found that his legs were bound too.

  Someone else was here. Someone with black shoes and trousers. Maybe that person would help him sit up. He hoped the black shoes would return.

  The darkness receded a little bit more. Why hadn’t the person helped him already?

  And something else. He had been in the old lab. The old lab had a floor of linoleum, not steel. Who had put him on this cold floor and bound his hands and feet?

  He no longer hoped the black shoes would return. He needed more time, so that his sore head could work things out. When there was a jarring in his cheek he closed his eyes again and relaxed. He felt the steps near him, stop. After a while there was another step, and then a sharp new pain. Someone had kicked him in the chest. But he lay relaxed, pretending that the blackness was still there. The steps went away again.

  The person in the black shoes was not going to help him.

  He risked opening his eyes again. Could he move his head? Yes, a little. He raised it from the floor an inch or two and looked around. His head ached. Across the room, not a very big room, he saw smooth steel walls with eyebolts, short chains dangling from them. He saw a steel door, slightly ajar, near his feet. The dim light in the room was coming through the porthole in the door.

  He was in the gas chamber.

  A surge of adrenaline drove back the last tatters of the darkness. He jerked his eyes toward the corner of the ceiling where the steel arm entered. A bag of pellets hung there above the little empty shelf.

  He had to get out.

  He hauled on his bonds, but with no effect except for a redoubling of the pain in his head. He understood now that he was chained to the wall, one leather collar tight around his wrists, another around his ankles. He pulled again. No use. Could he move his fingers enough to open the buckle? No. Could he double himself, pull the short lengths of chain together so that he could release his ankles? No, not that either.

  Was he going to die?

  No, of course not. That happened to other people. It just couldn’t happen to him.

  But it could, of course. After Lisette had died he had tried to bargain with God. Let it be a dream. Let me wake up. It’s too unfair. I don’t deserve it. I am special! But of course nothing had changed, except that he had learned that he was not special, that unfair things happened. And that despite all that, there could still be value and joy in life. Though not just now.

  He pulled futilely at the two constraining collars again, then settled in to look for a weak point. His probing fingers finally discovered that the eyebolt that held the chain to the wall was rough on one edge. He began methodically to rub the leather collar that held his wrists against it.

  There were voices now in the hall, indistinct through the crack in the door. Fear and hope surged through Nick all at once. It was Maggie and Dr. Weisen. Would they find him? Would they come let him out of this terrible room before the person with the shoes came back?

  But he stifled the cry that was about to burst from him to attract their attention, because his stiff-moving mind suddenly realized whose black shoes he had seen. The shoes had been Dr. Weisen’s.

  Swiftly, each piece thudding into place with an almost physical shock in his battered head, part of the story came clear to him. Dr. Weisen could raid the breeding colony. Dr. Weisen had free access to the old lab. His car was black; it had not been Tom’s car tonight behind the lab, it had been his. And the time before? Had Dr. Weisen been there the first time Nick had seen the car? He hadn’t been in the old lab while Tom and Nick fought in the dark. Where, then? In the new lab? Alone?

  Alone in the new lab, while the rats were killed.

  And Norman had said he’d been one of the last to leave the lab at the time of the first slaughter.

  But that was ridiculous. Why would he sabotage his own experiment?

  His aching mind dredged up another idea. Dr. Weisen was the one Norman would have told about the raids on the breeding colony. Gib, Les, Tom, Monica, Barbara—in Norman’s eyes, any of them might be able to profit from a private cache of experimental animals. Any of them were suspect. But not Maggie, the statistician who had so recently joined them; and in fact, Norman had been on the verge of telling Maggie. And not Dr. Weisen, who would have no reason to steal rats that were already his own.

  So maybe Norman had taken his discovery to Dr. Weisen. And Norman was dead. What had been wrong with Norman’s reasoning?

  For that matter, what was Nick—or rather, Rick—doing in the gas chamber now? What did he know that was dangerous to Dr. Weisen? Weisen had seen him come out of the furnace room, and must have realized that he’d seen the bags of rats. And must have tapped him most scientifically on the head, shoved him onto a wheeled rack, and hauled him in here to die.

  Why?

  And had Norman too been tapped on the head? Tapped on the head, filled with the alcohol he never drank, thrown into the ditch with his bike? Maybe hit again with that ugly rock?

  So it was possible, though senseless. Dr. Weisen might be the secret experimenter in his own lab. Dr. Weisen might be the one who had killed his own rats. He might be the one who had killed Norman. He might be preparing to kill Nick.

  But at the moment, only one thing was certain. Dr. Weisen was talking to Maggie in the hall outside, and his voice was annoyed.

  “What in the world are you doing here? Outsiders aren’t supposed to be in the clean areas.”

  “It’s urgent, Dr. Weisen. Anyway, I followed the rules. I showered and changed.” There was a hint of reproach in her voice. Dr. Weisen had not followed the rules. He was still in street clothes. By craning his neck, Nick could see tweed blocking the porthole window. For that matter, he had brought Nick here too without changing his clothes. Gib would be scandalized.

  Dr. Weisen said, “The point is, I’m very busy. There’s a
lot of work to catch up with. I’m not here this late by choice.”

  “Yes, I know. But I don’t want to take up your time. I just want to talk to Rick. Oh, look at all the nice cats!” She was prowling busily around the hall, Nick realized, looking into all the doors and corners, except this one. Dr. Weisen was planted rock-like against this door.

  “You want to talk to Rick? Why?”

  “I think in all the celebrating today I left a set of student homework papers here. But they weren’t out there where I thought I left them. So I wanted to ask Rick if he’d seen them. I have to catch him before he throws them away.”

  Good, thought Nick, she was wary of him. Did she suspect him too?

  “I see,” said Dr. Weisen. “Well, you can check the trash bins by the service door.’’

  “I already did. No luck.”

  “Did you knock on his door?”

  “Yes. He wasn’t there.”

  “Look, Maggie.” Dr. Weisen was becoming impatient. “Rick may not even be around. He takes walks on his breaks at night sometimes, especially when the weather is nice. Why don’t you check back in the morning?”

  “I’m afraid he’ll throw them away.”

  “Leave him a note, then.”

  “Oh, he’ll be back soon. Don’t you think so? I’ll just wait around here. What are you doing? Is that sulfuric acid?”

  We had a little Willy, thought Nick. Dr. Weisen said, “Yes, I’m making a preparation. And I really must get to work.”

  “Sure! Go right ahead. I’ll just wait.”

  “Well, please wait elsewhere. I’m very busy.”

  “Okay.”

  Weisen had not moved from his position blocking the chamber door. But now the bit of tweed visible in the porthole jerked suddenly, the door opened a little further, and Maggie landed in an ungainly heap by it. For a fraction of an instant the blue eyes took in Nick and the chamber, and then, full of apology, turned back up to Dr. Weisen. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Dr. Weisen! I’m so clumsy since I fell on that spike! This is the third time I’ve fallen down today!”