“Restaurant,” Dolly said. “They’re going in that Terrazo place.”
Il Terrazzo Antico was a two-story restaurant with glassed-in balconies. The décor was whorehouse modern, gilded everything. Pillars, ceiling, walls: every surface covered with decoration. Made Vasco jumpy just to look at it.
The couple walked in, right past the reservation desk, heading for a side table. And at the table, Vasco saw a heavyset guy who looked like a thug, dark-skinned and heavy-browed, and the thug was looking at the Russian girl and practically licking his lips.
Tolman marched right up to the table and spoke to the dark-skinned man. The guy looked puzzled. He didn’t invite them to sit. Vasco thought,Something’s wrong . The Russian girl had stepped back a pace.
At that moment a flash went off. Dolly had snapped a picture. The Tolman kid looked, took it all in, and bolted.
“Shit, Dolly!”
Vasco started running after Tolman, who was heading deeper into the restaurant. A waiter held up his hands. “Sir, excuse me—”
Vasco knocked him flat, kept right on going. Tolman was ahead, moving slower than he might, because he was trying not to shake his precious wine bottle. But he didn’t know where he was going anymore. He didn’t know the restaurant; he was just running.Whang through swinging doors, into the kitchen, Vasco right after him. Everybody was yelling at them, and some of the cooks were waving knives, but Tolman pushed on, apparently convinced there was some sort of rear entrance to the kitchen.
There wasn’t. He was trapped. He looked around wildly. Vasco slowed. He flashed one of his badges, in an official-looking wallet. “Citizen’s arrest,” he said. Tolman cowered back by two walk-in freezers and a narrow door with a slim vertical window. Tolman went through the narrow door and it closed behind him.
A light blinked by the door.
It was a service elevator.
Shit. “Where does this go?”
“Second floor.”
“Anywhere else?”
“No, just second floor.”
Vasco pressed his earpiece. “Dolly?”
“I’m on it,” she said. He heard her panting, as she ran up stairs.
Vasco positioned himself in front of the elevator door and waited. He pressed the button to bring the elevator down.
“I’m at the elevator now,” Dolly said. “I saw him; he went back down.”
“That’s a tiny elevator,” Vasco said.
“I know.”
“If he’s really got liquid nitrogen with him, he shouldn’t be in there.” A couple of years back, Vasco had chased a fugitive into a laboratory-supply warehouse. The guy had nearly suffocated after he locked himself in a closet.
The elevator came down. As soon as it stopped, Vasco yanked the handle to open it, but Tolman must have pushed an emergency switch, because the door wouldn’t open. Vasco could see the wine sack on the floor. The velvet had been pushed down to reveal the stainless steel rim of the dewar.
And the top was off. White steam around the opening.
Through the glass, Tolman stared at him, wild-eyed. “Come out, son,” Vasco said. “Don’t be foolish.”
Tolman shook his head.
“It’s dangerous,” Vasco said. “You know it’s dangerous.”
But the kid pushed a button, and the elevator started back up.
Vasco had a bad feeling.
The kid knew, all right. He knew exactly what he was doing.
“He’s up here,”Dolly said, standing on the second floor. “But the door won’t open. No, he’s going down again.”
“Go back to the table,” Vasco said to her. “Let him go.”
She realized at once what he was talking about. She hurried back down the plush red velvet staircase to the ground floor. She was not surprised to see that the table where the thuggish man had sat was now empty. No thug. No beautiful Russian girl. Just a hundred-dollar bill tucked under a glass. He’d paid in cash, of course.
And vanished.
Vasco wasnow surrounded by three hotel security guys, all talking at once. Standing half a head above them he yelled for quiet. “One thing,” he said. “How do we get the elevator open?”
“He must have hit the override.”
“How do we get itopen ?”
“We have to kill the power to it.”
“Will that open it?”
“No, but then we can wedge it open, once it’s stopped.”
“How long will that take?”
“Maybe ten, fifteen minutes. Doesn’t matter, this guy isn’t going anyplace.”
“Yes, he is,” Vasco said.
The security guy laughed. “Where the hell can he go?”
The elevator came down again. Tolman was on his knees, holding the glass door shut.
“Get up,” Vasco said. “Get up, get up. Come on, son, it’s not worth it, stand up!”
Suddenly, Tolman’s eyes rolled up into his head and he fell onto his back. The elevator started to rise.
“What the hell?” one of the security men said. “Who is he, anyway?”
Ah shit, Vasco thought.
The kidhad pushed some override that had jammed the elevator circuits. It took them forty minutes to get the doors open and haul him out. He was long since dead, of course. The instant he fell, he was immersed in 100 percent nitrogen atmosphere, from the liquid nitrogen that was streaming from the dewar. Because nitrogen was heavier than air, it progressively filled the elevator from the bottom up. Once the kid flopped on his back, he was already unconscious, and he would have died within a minute.
The security guys wanted to know what was in the dewar, which was no longer smoking. Vasco got some gloves and pulled out the long metal stick. There was nothing there, just a series of empty clips where the embryos should have been. The embryos had been removed.
“You mean to say he killed himself?” one of the security men said.
“That’s right,” Vasco said. “He worked in an embryology lab. He knew about the danger of liquid nitrogen in a confined space.” Nitrogen caused more laboratory fatalities than any other chemical. Half the people who died were trying to rescue co-workers who had collapsed in confined spaces.
“It was his way out of a bad situation,” Vasco said.
Later, driving homewith him, Dolly said, “So what happened to the embryos?”
Vasco shook his head. “No idea. The kid never got them.”
“You think the girl took them? Before she went to his room?”
“Somebody took them.” Vasco sighed. “The hotel doesn’t know her?”
“They reviewed security cameras. They don’t know her.”
“And her student status?”
“University had her as a student last year. She didn’t enroll this year.”
“So she’s vanished.”
“Yeah,” Dolly said. “Her, the dark-skinned guy, the embryos. Everything vanished.”
“I’d like to know how all this goes together,” Vasco said.
“Maybe it doesn’t,” Dolly said.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Vasco said. Up ahead, he saw the neon of a roadhouse in the desert. He pulled over. He needed a drink.
CH001
Division 48of Los Angeles Superior Court was a wood-paneled room dominated by the great seal of the state of California. The room was small and had a tawdry feeling. The reddish carpet was frayed and streaked with dirt. The wood veneer on the witness stand was chipped, and one of the fluorescent lights was out, leaving the jury box darker than the rest of the room. The jurors themselves were dressed casually, in jeans and short-sleeve shirts. The judge’s chair squeaked whenever the Honorable Davis Pike turned away to glance at his laptop, which he did often throughout the day. Alex Burnet suspected he was checking his e-mail or his stocks.
All in all, this courtroom seemed an odd place to litigate complex issues of biotechnology, but that was what they had been doing for the past two weeks inFrank M. Burnet v. Regents of the University of California
.
Alex was thirty-two, a successful litigator, a junior partner in her law firm. She sat at the plaintiff’s table with the other members of her father’s legal team, and watched as her father took the witness stand. Although she smiled reassuringly, she was, in fact, worried about how he would fare.
Frank Burnet was a barrel-chested man who looked younger than his fifty-one years. He appeared healthy and confident as he was sworn in. Alex knew that her father’s vigorous appearance could undermine his case. And, of course, the pretrial publicity had been savagely negative. Rick Diehl’s PR team had worked hard to portray her dad as an ungrateful, greedy, unscrupulous man. A man who interfered with medical research. A man who wouldn’t keep his word, who just wanted money.
None of that was true—in reality, it was the opposite of the truth. But not a single reporter had called her father to ask his side of the story. Not one. Behind Rick Diehl stood Jack Watson, the famous philanthropist. The media assumed that Watson was the good guy, and therefore her father was the bad guy. Once that version of the morality play appeared in theNew York Times (written by the local entertainment reporter), everybody else fell into line. There was a huge “me, too” piece in theL.A. Times, trying to outdo the New York version in vilifying her father. And the local news shows kept up a daily drumbeat about the man who wanted to halt medical progress, the man who dared criticize UCLA, that renowned center of learning, the great hometown university. A half-dozen cameras followed her and her father whenever they walked up the courthouse steps.
Their own efforts to get the story out had been singularly unsuccessful. Her father’s hired media advisor was competent enough, but no match for Jack Watson’s well-oiled, well-financed machine.
Of course, members of the jury would have seen some of the coverage. And the impact of the coverage was to put added pressure on her father not merely to tell his story, but also to redeem himself, to contradict the damage already done to him by the press, before he ever got to the witness stand.
Her father’s attorneystood and began his questions. “Mr. Burnet, let me take you back to the month of June, some eight years ago. What were you doing at that time?”
“I was working construction,” her father said, in a firm voice. “Supervising all the welding on the Calgary natural gas pipeline.”
“And when did you first suspect you were ill?”
“I started waking up in the night. Soaking wet, drenched.”
“You had a fever?”
“I thought so.”
“You consulted a doctor?”
“Not for a while,” he said. “I thought I had the flu or something. But the sweats never stopped. After a month, I started to feel very weak. Then I went to the doctor.”
“And what did the doctor tell you?”
“He said I had a growth in my abdomen. And he referred me to the most eminent specialist on the West Coast. A professor at UCLA Medical Center, in Los Angeles.”
“Who was that specialist?”
“Dr. Michael Gross. Over there.” Her father pointed to the defendant, sitting at the next table. Alex did not look over. She kept her gaze on her father.
“And were you subsequently examined by Dr. Gross?”
“Yes, I was.”
“He conducted a physical exam?”
“Yes.”
“Did he do any tests at that time?”
“Yes. He took blood and he did X-rays and a CAT scan of my entire body. And he took a biopsy of my bone marrow.”
“How was that done, Mr. Burnet?”
“He stuck a needle in my hipbone, right here. The needle punches through the bone and into the marrow. They suck out the marrow and analyze it.”
“And after these tests were concluded, did he tell you his diagnosis?”
“Yes. He said I had acute T-cell lymphoblastic leukemia.”
“What did you understand that disease to be?”
“Cancer of the bone marrow.”
“Did he propose treatment?”
“Yes. Surgery and then chemotherapy.”
“And did he tell you your prognosis? What the outcome of this disease was likely to be?”
“He said that it wasn’t good.”
“Was he more specific?”
“He said, probably less than a year.”
“Did you subsequently get a second opinion from another doctor?”
“Yes, I did.”
“With what result?”
“My diagnosis was…he, uh…he confirmed the diagnosis.” Her father paused, bit his lip, fighting emotion. Alex was surprised. He was usually tough and unemotional. She felt a twinge of concern for him, even though she knew this moment would help his case. “I was scared, really scared,” her father said. “They all told me…I didn’t have long to live.” He lowered his head.
The courtroom was silent.
“Mr. Burnet, would you like some water?”
“No. I’m fine.” He raised his head, passed his hand across his forehead.
“Please continue when you’re ready.”
“I got a third opinion, too. And everybody said to me that Dr. Gross was the best doctor for this disease.”
“So you initiated your therapy with Dr. Gross.”
“Yes. I did.”
Her father seemed to have recovered. Alex sat back in her chair, took a breath. The testimony unrolled smoothly now, a story her father had told dozens of times before. How he, a scared and frightened man, fearing for his life, had put his faith in Dr. Gross; how he had undergone surgery and chemotherapy under the direction of Dr. Gross; how the symptoms of the disease had slowly faded over the course of the following year; how Dr. Gross had seemed at first to believe that her father was well, his treatment successfully completed.
“You had follow-up examinations with Dr. Gross?”
“Yes. Every three months.”
“With what result?”
“Everything was normal. I gained weight, my strength came back, my hair grew back. I felt good.”
“And then what happened?”
“About a year later, after one of my checkups, Dr. Gross called to say he needed to do more tests.”
“Did he say why?”
“He said some of my blood work didn’t look right.”
“Did he say which tests, specifically?”
“No.”
“Did he say you still had cancer?”
“No, but that’s what I was afraid of. He had never repeated any tests before.” Her father shifted in his chair. “I asked him if the cancer had come back, and he said, ‘Not at this point, but we need to monitor you very closely.’ He insisted I needed constant testing.”
“How did you react?”
“I was terrified. In a way, it was worse the second time. When I was sick the first time, I made my will, made all the preparations. Then I got well and I got a new lease on life—a chance to start over. Then his phone call came, and I was terrified again.”
“You believed you were sick.”
“Of course. Why else would he be repeating tests?”
“You were frightened?”
“Terrified.”
Watching the questioning, Alex thought,It’s too bad we don’t have pictures. Her father appeared vigorous and hearty. She remembered when he had been frail, gray, and weak. His clothes had hung on his frame; he looked like a dying man. Now he looked strong, like the construction worker he had been all his life. He didn’t look like a man who became frightened easily. Alex knew these questions were essential to establish a basis for fraud, and a basis for mental distress. But it had to be done carefully. And their lead lawyer, she knew, had a bad habit of ignoring his own notes once the testimony was rolling.
The lawyer said, “What happened next, Mr. Burnet?”
“I went in for tests. Dr. Gross repeated everything. He even did another liver biopsy.”
“With what result?”
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