“Because I promised Murph I’d find out who—”
“And then what, Nate? Then what?” She was back in the doorway, the towel balled in her hand. “What exactly are you going to do that the police can’t? And what are you going to do if you do actually find out who did this horrible thing? Grab a posse and go string ’em up at the old oak tree? Cuff ’em and throw away the key?”
I didn’t have an answer for her.
She stepped over to the couch, knelt in front of me, took my hands in hers. The towel was wet against my skin.
“Nate, I’m scared, really scared. What these people did terrifies me. It terrifies me that you’d probably be dead if you’d shown up ten minutes earlier. It terrifies me that you want to find these people, to let them into your life. You did that last year. You can’t do it again.”
“I’m scared, too.”
“Then stop this.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?” Her eyes glistened. “Is this all about giving yourself some purpose? A quick fix because the rest of your life is in flux?”
“His kids and wife, Brooke…I promised.”
“He’s dead. He doesn’t give a damn about your promise.” The tears welled. “I took off work to be with you today, to curl up, watch movies, go to the beach maybe, or just sit around and hold your hand or have sex with you or whatever you need. But you don’t want any comfort, do you, Nate?”
“He used to be my best friend.”
“Since when? Ten years? Two days ago you couldn’t stand the thought of the guy.”
“Okay, well, we might have had some unresolved issues.”
“So they’re going to stay unresolved, aren’t they? He’s dead, Nate. I’m not. I’m slipping away from you. I’m trying not to, but I am. And you’re not reaching out at all. I don’t want to play any more games, I don’t want to give you any more hints. Because I know you see them and you just don’t seem to care.”
“I am reaching out.”
“Please don’t say that. Oh, Nate, please don’t say that when you know you’re not.” Brooke’s head was now buried between my knees, her tears dampening the denim of my jeans. She looked up. “Just get a job. It doesn’t have to be forever, just so we can get back on our feet. But please stay away from Tetra Biologics. Please don’t call that detective anymore. Stay out of it. Please.”
I sat there, listening to her cry. She was right. Murph’s family’s death did give me a reason for being on the planet at that moment. It gave me an answer to the question I’d been avoiding for months: Why am I here? Simple: To find out what happened to these people, to snatch a little justice for them.
But I wondered, too, how much I was running toward something, how much I was running away. The trajectory of us—of Brooke and Nate—had been so clear a month before. Get life back on track, get job, move to own apartment, then move back in with Brooke. Get married. Kids. Mortgage. All that grown-up stuff. Now, the view of us was so hazy, I couldn’t even see through to the next day.
So is that what this was, some juvenile commitment phobia? That the train was moving too fast and this was my pathetic attempt to slow it down?
I stroked the hair of the woman I loved—there was no doubt that I loved her—and said, simply, “I’ll stay out of it. I promise.”
15
WE SPENT THE REST OF the day together, Brooke and I, doing our best to get the relationship off life support. It was pretty good, all in all, if you don’t count the moments where Murph and his family intruded. And they intruded—with their sliced-up necks and desperate final breaths—quite a bit.
Sex, lunch, a trip to the beach. We rounded out the day with a flick: some Jennifer Aniston vehicle Brooke wanted to see and which I was reasonably sure contained no violence. A late dinner. Some kissing. Bed.
I could be cynical and say the day was just another iteration of what became our collective m.o.—heavy discussion or fight, make up, things get good for a day, then it’s same old same old. But this was not really the same old. I carried four bodies with me, now, to every conversation, every meal, every kiss.
The next day I cracked a little. Brooke was at work and I found myself with nothing to do. Idle hands and such. My deficient doctoring the night of Murph and family’s murder had been getting to me and the only way I could think to alleviate the guilt was to beat myself up a little more about it. I called a guy I knew from residency, now a trauma surgeon in North Carolina.
Ted Black returned my page after two minutes. Gotta love the efficiency of a surgeon. In addition to having the fastest hands in his class, Ted was actually a nice guy. So after the requisite catching up, after I gave him the grisly details, all he said was, “They were goners, Nate. Nothing else you could have done.”
“There’s got to be something.”
“Through both external jugulars, probably deep enough to nick the carotids? No way, bud. You get an airway and apply direct pressure and say your prayers. Hope to God they get to the OR in time. You say your prayers?”
“I think so.”
“That’s it, then. You did all you can. Don’t think any more on it.”
Easy for Dr. Black, whose job toughened him for defeats like that. Not so easy for a medicine doc like me.
I thanked Ted, and we made vague plans to get together when we were next in each other’s orbits.
So, that’s it, then. Guilt moderately assuaged, emphasis on moderately.
I called some of my job leads; they hadn’t yet reviewed my CV or my application. Calls to landlords were more fruitful, and I set up appointments to see two places in the city.
Here I was: not keeping my promise to Murph by keeping my promise to Brooke. What a mess.
With the rest of the day open to me, and with Brooke MIA somewhere at the S.C. Dept. of Public Health, I took a little trip over to my former university, to the med school library. If Brooke called, I could always say it was just a little trip down Memory Lane. Shitty memories, sure, but still…
What I wanted was some access to databases to which the university subscribed. Those would be the best places to find anything out about Tetra Biologics. I wasn’t paying the company a visit, right? Just a little recon.
I also didn’t want Brooke stumbling through the history files on her computer.
It had been just over a year since I’d visited the medical school. Since returning to the Bay Area, I made a point to avoid the place. Bad memories grafted onto bad memories transplanted into more bad memories. Still, being there wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Some people get a sense of the sublime from mountains; I get it from big academic medical centers. In addition to the buildings I knew well—one that housed my first lab, one where Murph and I had done the bulk of our work—there rose a relatively new clothespin-shaped building high to one side of the parking lot, wine-colored banisters running around the top two floors. The inside face of the clothespin was all glass and labs and looked out to a granite courtyard. The outside looked like it had been lifted from a 1960s motel.
I walked into the low-slung medical school building—which everyone wanted to see torn down but which never would be, owing to its landmark status. This was the oldest part of the complex, designed by a famous architect who had a thing for poured concrete, inner courtyards, the color beige, and, bizarrely, a vague swastika design that found its way onto all the exterior walls and columns of the place.
The library encircled one of the courtyards, this one with a large tree that kept the cleaning staff busy by raining sticky detritus over the cushy outdoor chairs and tables beneath it.
In the computer alcove, I started with Google, then went to LexisNexis. There was a reason I never contemplated an analyst job on Wall Street: the work was so tedious it made working in a lab seem like the most exciting thing on the planet by comparison. After forty minutes, I had managed to dig up some information that wasn’t very interesting to me but might have been to the Wall Street folks. To wit: Tetra Biologics was formed five years befor
e by a former professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a business guy who’d formerly headed a small medical devices company. The professor’s name was Tom Bukowski and the money man was Dustin Alberts. No public filings, so the company was in private hands, held by a few venture capital firms, some investment from Big Pharma, a small investment firm called Gold Coast Capital. They had exactly one drug on the market: an interferon used to treat multiple sclerosis. The rest of their drugs were in some lower stage of development. Two of those were in the FDA approval process, very close, it seemed, to getting to market. One was the transcription factor inhibitor that Murph had been working on. The other was some tissue regeneration project for wound healing and “other soft tissue defects.” Well, good for Tetra and its investors. Yawn.
As I was about to slip into a REM cycle, I came across something interesting, not just to the Wall Street guys, but to salacious news outlets and, frankly, to me. Tom Bukowski, one of Tetra’s two founders, was dead.
I expanded my search to older articles. It seemed that August two years before had been not so good for Tetra, and decidedly bad for the company’s Chief Science Officer. On August 23, Bukowski was on a deep-sea fishing trip out of Monterey, California, when an explosion tore through the boat. Bukowski was killed, along with a man named Peter Yee. The captain and the first mate were also goners. Neither Peter Yee’s nor the first mate’s bodies was discovered. Bukowski’s corpse—part of it, anyway—was found by students from a local diving class.
The articles revealed there was some question of foul play, but the investigators concluded that mechanical error caused the explosion. The “mechanical error,” it was thought, stemmed from a faulty fuel line and accumulated diesel fumes belowdecks. Lawsuits from Bukowski’s family against the boat’s owners and against the manufacturer of the engine were settled out of court.
I searched a little longer. I found nothing about Paul Murphy’s good friends at Tetra. Nothing about his buds with whom he might have discussed “really bad things.”
In the courtyard, I betrayed Brooke for the second time that afternoon. I called Bonita Sanchez. The detective wasn’t ecstatic to hear from me, but, as I reminded her, I hadn’t pestered her for a full day. That seemed to work, and she opened up a little. By “a little,” I mean she informed me they continued to give 110 percent to the investigation. I asked her if she’d spoken with Murph’s friends and relatives. Of course, she said. I asked her if she’d spoken with his colleagues at Tetra. Of course, of course.
In the end, she finally did soften enough to come clean with me. “It’s starting to look like a home invasion gone bad,” she said. “I’m sorry.” Then she swore and told me she’d kill me if I talked to the press. Since I was feeling pretty kindly toward her for the candor, I said I wouldn’t.
Still, after the call, I couldn’t stop poking at it. Murph was dead—Drew and Stephanie and Diane were dead—and those deaths threatened to go unexplained. Worse, those deaths threatened to be meaningless. Tragedy compounding tragedy.
So, perhaps I should explain some of the “unresolved issues” between Murph and me ten years ago. I wasn’t, actually, booted from school following the whole massaged-data fiasco. They had asked me to take a leave of absence, and I did, finally settling into a brainless job at the coffee shop on campus. As I said, Murph had been pretty self-righteous about my problems in the lab and with my PhD. What I didn’t say is that the guy bent over backward to make amends.
For more than two weeks, with barista Nate McCormick slinging his lattes and cappuccinos, Paul Murphy would stop by for a daily cup of coffee. Each day he tried to engage me in conversation. At first, his overtures seemed pathetic to me—the efforts of someone who couldn’t see I had no intention of keeping him as a friend. As week one bled into week two, his persistence became annoying.
Eventually, Murph worked himself up to a big apology for being so strident about my problems in the lab. By then, though, self-righteousness had become mine.
“Great,” I told him, flipping my little towel over my shoulder and motioning him down to the end of the bar. “All water under the bridge, right?”
“I was kind of hoping so,” Murph said.
“You want it both ways, buddy? Look like a Boy Scout for the department, then get me back on your side because you feel bad?”
“I’m just saying that I’m sorry—”
“Well, don’t say it, man. Too late.” I turned from him, headed back to the cash register. The line was getting long, and Becca, the other barista, kept shooting me desperate glances.
“Good luck with your fabulous career,” I said loudly. “Or whatever.” Two words like stakes in the heart of what had been my best friendship in medical school. My last image of Paul Murphy was this: the big man looking at me as though he’d been slapped in the face. He stood for a moment, sighed like a wounded animal, then slumped out the door.
Less than a month later, I assaulted some idiot while on duty at the coffee shop. A week after that, the school sent me packing.
Ten years passed and Murph offered another apology in another coffee shop. This time I accepted, taking my first baby-steps toward patching things up with him. I think I had every intention of making him a friend again, but some sadist with a knife had deprived me of the opportunity. And now I was left with unresolved, unrelieved guilt. Guilt at having shut the man out, guilt at not having been able to help him or his family.
So, had guilt placed me in the library? Probably. Anger? A need for vengeance? Those, too. But beyond such venalities was a sense that the world had been knocked off-kilter by his murder and balance needed to be restored. I wanted to inject a little justice into an unjust world.
I couldn’t really go hoofing around Murph’s social circle, since I didn’t know where that social circle was, and I was now sure the police wouldn’t help me get started. Another thing I was sure of, though: the circle intersected Tetra Biologics somewhere.
To assuage my conscience for talking to Bonita Sanchez when I’d promised not to, and for even considering a trip to Tetra, I put in a call to Brooke. “What are you wearing?” I asked.
“Crotchless panties. I have a meeting with my boss later.”
Brooke’s boss came in at about five-eight, two-fifty. A heart attack waiting to happen.
Just as I was telling her I was at home repacking boxes, a stream of medical students hemorrhaged out of a classroom somewhere and flowed into the courtyard.
“What’s that noise?” she asked.
“Squirrels,” I said, then told her I needed to grab a golf club and deal with them. I don’t think she believed me. Neither of us played golf.
“How’s the job search going?” she asked.
“Super. They just offered me a position as the Commandant of Health for the State of California.”
“Wow. I didn’t even know there was such a position.”
“There wasn’t. They’re creating it especially for me.”
“Couldn’t happen to a more stable guy. Hey, I need to go,” she said. “I really do have a meeting with my boss.”
I made it a point to thank her boss someday for his impeccable timing.
Back in the library, trying to make good on the job-search fib, I started trolling through the listings on the computer. Made researching Tetra look awesome by comparison.
Besides, I wasn’t really thinking about jobs. I was thinking about how to get inside Tetra. Security is a bitch these days, especially in a field like biotech where people were very freaked about corporate espionage. So, how to sleuth it out? I suppose I could camp outside in Tetra’s parking lot, collar people as they left work. No, too creepy, especially after what just happened to one of their colleagues. I could always find an employee list and visit them at home. Really creepy. I could get a job with the cleaning service, rummage through files. Interesting. I wondered what they’d pay.
Since I was on the job-hunting tip anyway, I cruised ov
er to the Tetra Biologics site, to their “Careers” section, which was given top-bar real estate on the home page. A word to kids everywhere—college students, teens, and tweens—study your science, boys and girls. Science is where it’s at, jobwise. But if those nitwits in Washington and Wichita get their way, we’ll all be debating the finer points of what day, exactly, God gave the sloth his three toes, rather than working on anything useful.
Okay, time to dismount from my high horse, which, I believe, was created on Day 4, sometime in the afternoon, right after the creation of sparrows, and right before…There I go again.
Jobs, ladies and gentlemen. And what a job it was: Tetra’s Assistant Medical Director—Antivirals. It was situated in a category called “Drug Development, Medical/Clinical Affairs.” The ideal career move for a guy who’d spent the last few years hunting down those infectious buggers.
Oh, boy, wouldn’t Brooke be proud? Truth is, she’d probably castrate me, but what the hell? I needed the work.
I pulled out my jump drive, uploaded my CV through their website. Done. Simple as that.
Well, maybe not that simple: Brooke’s tear-streaked face came into view. Definitely not simple.
I walked through the scuffed gray hallway, past the lawn where, in med school, we tossed the football between classes, past the modernist bench where Gary Bortner chipped his tooth doing a handstand to impress Melissa Patch. I smiled. Those were the easy days, before I’d slipped off the rungs of my ladder and landed in a career-and social-isolation ward. As if on cue, darker places slid into the scene: the Dunner Building, where I’d tinkered with the research that got me kicked out of school. The Heilmann Building, where my old mentor had her lab.
It was difficult to believe I was back in this place. Not just back here, but stuck here, for a little while, anyway. What kept me pinned and wriggling on the wall were the images of those two dead kids, of a dead man and his murdered wife, of plastic kitchen tubes sticking out of their throats as their last breaths hissed and faded to nothing.
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