by Meg Perry
It was time for my reference shift. Right on time, Clinton appeared at the reference desk. I wasn’t busy at that moment, and he walked right up to me.
“Hi, Clinton.”
He looked at me gravely. “The word of the day is chrestomathy.”
I had to ask him how to spell that one. I wrote it on a card; he bowed and walked away. I looked it up. It meant a collection of selected literary passages.
Ooo-kay. Not sure I could use that one in a sentence by the end of the day.
Once I was done at reference, I finished re-shelving in my office, then decided to do a quick Google check on the authors of both of the articles. The Americans were easy to find. Tristan Oliver, MD, PhD, and Alana Wray, MD, were the medical directors of Fertility Research. Benjamin Goldstein, MD, was apparently their employee. Fertility Research seemed to be a small, privately-funded organization, renting space in one of the medical office buildings adjacent to Cedars. Its website was pretty basic, but it did include the doctors’ credentials and a list of their publications.
Oliver, Wray, and Goldstein were graduates of US medical schools. Oliver had done a stint at Cambridge University, doing post-fellowship work in stem cell research back in 2002-3. Then he’d come to LA and joined forces with Wray, who had done postdoctoral training at NIH. They applied for a grant to open their own lab; a year after that, they’d published their first of many articles. The 2007 article that I now had was their big breakthrough. Both doctors were listed as clinical faculty at USC medical school, but I couldn’t find any evidence that they actually taught anything. Maybe they taught stem cell research. Goldstein, for his part, had co-written articles with Wray and Oliver since the 2007 paper, but hadn’t gone to work for the lab until 2010, when he’d finished his OB-GYN residency at USC.
After the publication of the 2007 article, Oliver and Wray’s lab had no difficulties in getting funded. At least every other month, Oliver was pictured accepting a very large check from a “sponsor.” Oliver’s name was in the “Living” section of the LA Times a couple of times a year. He and his wife hosted fundraisers at their Bel-Air home for various charities. Everyone looked tastefully wealthy. Wray’s name turned up more often in the results of West Coast triathlons, finishing in the top three in her age group, 40-45. One article had a blurry picture of her crossing a finish line, but her face was covered with a ball cap and it wasn’t possible to tell what she looked like. There was a feature article from 2009 on the lab itself; Oliver was pictured, and Wray spoke movingly about her lifelong quest for better answers to the problem of infertility.
Benjamin Goldstein didn’t turn up in any news at all other than his appointment to the lab.
The Welsh authors were a different story. David Hughes and Marc Llewellyn had been researchers at a similar lab at Oxford until mid-2003. They had also published a series of papers, but none of them were breakthroughs. The papers had been published in decreasingly prestigious journals, until their last article, the one cited by Dan in his letter, had appeared in the Welsh Medical Journal. The funding for the lab dried up, and it was closed. Neither man had ever published again. Interestingly, the existence of Hughes and Llewellyn’s lab overlapped in time with Tristan Oliver’s years at Cambridge. Oliver might have known Hughes and Llewellyn. It wasn’t unusual for researchers with a narrow specialty to be professionally incestuous. Everyone in a unique subspecialty knew everyone else, whether it was Celtic warrior queen Boudicca (the subject of my doctoral dissertation) or stem cell fertility research.
The most surprising information about Hughes and Llewellyn was that they were both dead. David Hughes had died in 2006 of a heart attack while on his morning jog. He had been in his 60s. Marc Llewellyn had died in 2003, not long after the publication of his last article, in a horrific car crash on the M40 outside Oxford. I flinched involuntarily; I’d been on that stretch of road many times. The accident had been a hit-and-run; one car, driven by Llewellyn, had been nearly destroyed. The other was never found, and there were no witnesses, so the investigation had gone nowhere. Llewellyn wasn’t killed outright, but suffered severe head trauma and passed away the next day.
I considered what I had learned. Two articles, three dead men. Was it just bad luck? It didn’t seem to be bad luck for Oliver et al. They were doing just fine. Hughes’s death seemed ordinary enough, and on the surface, so did Dan’s. Llewellyn’s car accident was likely just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The article titles made more sense now. It was as I’d originally thought. Hughes and Llewellyn hadn’t been successful with their research, so they’d published their last article and given it up. Oliver had probably become aware of Hughes and Llewellyn’s work when he was in Cambridge, and had come back to the U.S. to continue the research in his own lab. A few years later, with better technology, Oliver and Wray figured out how to make it work and published their article. The breakthrough had brought the money pouring in, and the doctors were now reaping the rewards of their hard work. And Oliver and Wray had probably hired Benjamin Goldstein to give themselves more time away from the lab to raise money and host parties and compete in triathlons.
It all made perfect sense, except for one thing.
What had Dan wanted me to find out?
It was time to go home, and I still hadn’t done anything with the statistics in Oliver and Wray’s article. I wasn’t going to start anything now. Maybe I’d work on that over the weekend. I still didn’t have the Welsh article, so there wasn’t anything else to do until I got it. I decided to go home.
I was dragging as I walked across campus. What a week. It was only four days, and it felt like forty. I was exhausted.
There weren’t a lot of people around, even though it was early evening and still fully light. As I passed the intramural fields, it registered that someone was behind me. I didn’t think much of it until I crossed Gayley and the guy was still with me. It was a guy, that much I could tell, but I couldn’t see anything that would allow me to describe him in any more detail. He was wearing a ball cap, hoodie, and jeans. Just like 95% of the male students at the university.
I turned onto Landfair from Strathmore and headed south. My apartment was on Roebling, but if I was being followed, I didn’t want to lead the guy straight to it. I was considering passing up Roebling and crossing back onto campus when I got to the end of Landfair. I’d just about decided to do that when the guy turned off, into an apartment complex about three buildings up from Roebling.
Now who was paranoid? I chastised myself and promptly forgot all about it.
Saturday June 2
Saturday morning dawned with the promise of a beautiful day. Pete and Kevin had planned a day of hiking in Topanga Canyon, and I had decided to go along. Abby was going too, and my brother Jeff was taking a rare Saturday off to come with us.
Jeff was the oldest, a year older than Kevin and two years older than me. He was a veterinarian, and lived in Oceanside, the town where we'd grown up, with his wife Valerie and their two boys. He'd run cross country in high school and college and was still wiry. He'd stopped running to save his knees, but he still surfed and took the boys hiking at every opportunity. And, occasionally, he'd drive up the coast and join us on the trails for a day.
Jeff showed up at the apartment at the crack of dawn. I had just smacked the snooze button for the second time when I heard pounding on the door. I pulled on a pair of sweats and staggered into the living room. I could hear the shower running. It was probably Abby; she was one of those people. Morning people. I opened the door. "Good Lord. What time did you get up?"
"4:30. And I drove fast." Jeff gave me a hug. "How ya doin'?"
"Fine. How's everything at home?"
Jeff considered. "Fine, really. Colin’s decided he wants to go to space camp this summer, so we've got to find one. Is there anything at Cal Tech?"
"I don't know, but I can find out."
"Would you? And let me know. We'd rather not send him out of state at age t
en."
"Right…" I scratched a note to myself on the refrigerator message board.
Kevin appeared, and the talk devolved into brotherly insults. Abby yelled out the door for us to shut up and load the car. So we did.
We all piled into Jeff's CRV and drove to Santa Monica to pick up Pete.
Pete lived in Santa Monica on 17th Street, just around the corner from Wilshire, in a townhouse he’d inherited from a great-uncle. The place was beautiful, and the location was great. Pete could walk to his teaching job at Santa Monica College and jog to the beach.
When we pulled up, I jumped out of the passenger seat and went to the door. Pete was ready, of course, meeting me at the door with his backpack in hand. He grinned and gave me a quick hug, which was a little surprising, but I hugged him back. "Come on, you get the front seat."
He laughed. "It pays to be the tallest."
"Ha ha." I lifted his backpack as he locked the door. "Holy shit, what do you have in here? Bricks?"
"Nah, concrete blocks today." He took it from me and did a couple of biceps curls with it. "That's not that heavy, you wuss."
"I'll show you wuss." I chased him down the sidewalk, where we proceeded to let Jeff and Kevin join in the teasing and friendly insults all the way to Topanga Canyon. By the time we got there, Abby was threatening to walk back home.
We found a parking spot without too much trouble, since we were so early, and headed toward Eagle Rock. We were chatting along the way when we spotted a dead field mouse at the side of the trail. Jeff commented on it, and Kevin said, "Oh, that reminds me, I got the autopsy results on your friend last night."
Pete said, "Wow, that was fast."
Jeff said, "What friend?"
I said, "What did it show?"
"Not much." Kevin took a drink of water. "There wasn't anything inconsistent with a seizure, except that there were therapeutic levels of his seizure medication in his blood. But that doesn't mean he didn't have a seizure. It was too long from the time of death to determine whether his muscle enzymes were elevated, like they would have been immediately after the seizure."
"But the fact that the levels of his meds were where they should be - isn't that a little odd? Did the coroner comment on it?"
"He commented on it to the extent that he said it was a little odd. That was it. There was nothing else to suggest any other cause of death. There was nothing at all to suggest foul play. So the coroner signed it off as probable seizure. He didn't have anything else to hang it on."
Jeff held up his hand. "Okay. Somebody tell me what's going on."
So I told. Everything, right through my silly thought that I might have been followed last night. Kevin was interested to hear what the computer crimes detective had said yesterday.
When I finished, Jeff said, "Okay, let's recap. Your buddy dies under what the coroner refers to as 'odd' circumstances. Then you get a letter from said buddy, suggesting that he's in danger of some sort and passing his investigation of these two articles on to you. Then you request said articles and weird shit starts happening to you. Your computer goes wonky three days in a row, one of the doctors shows up in person to question you, another of the doctors shows up at the funeral and turns out to be your dead buddy’s boyfriend, you visit the scene of the death and your tires get slashed, and then someone follows you home last night. All of that sounds pretty suspicious to me."
"But there are alternate explanations of everything so far." Pete started ticking off on his fingers. "There's no evidence that Dan didn't die of a seizure. You said he'd had a head injury and had some emotional problems as a result; his paranoia could be explained that way. You saw your friend Diane using your computer; she could be punking you for some reason. The doctor that visited you told you that he was worried about patent infringement. The doctor at the funeral had reason to be there, assuming he really was the boyfriend. You said yourself that your tires might have been slashed because of your bumper sticker. And you also said yourself that the guy following you turned off well before you did, and you had decided he wasn't following you after all. Although..." He folded the fingers he'd been counting on into a fist. "The circumstantial evidence for something going on is starting to pile up."
Kevin: "But it is circumstantial. There's no solid evidence of anything yet."
Abby: "But there may be, after the UCLA cops finish with your computer."
Me: "Yeah, and I'm afraid that will show that Diane was responsible. That would be bad."
Jeff: "Have you found anything in the articles yet to explain what Dan might have been getting at?"
"Nope. Although, on the copy of the article I found in his desk, he had written BULLSHIT in capital letters over the top of the statistics section. I need to see if I can figure out what the statistics show and why he might have said that. But right now, that's all I have to go on."
"I might be able to help you with that." Pete glanced at me as he picked his way around a couple of rocks. "I did recently finish a dissertation for which I had to do a lot of stats. It's moderately fresh in my mind."
"That would be great. I was going to try to figure it out with help from the Internet, but I'm sure it won't take as long for you."
He laughed. "Well, I wouldn't be too sure about that, but I'll do my best."
We were back home by mid-afternoon after dropping Pete off. Jeff needed to start for home, and I was tired again. Kevin and Abby left again to go to Abby’s sister’s for a cookout. Abby had invited me, but I begged off. I’d spent my evenings reading this stupid medical article, and I was getting behind on my other reading. I had a new issue of the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies and a stack of books that were calling to me. I gathered drinks and snacks, propped pillows behind me, and settled in for an evening of reading.
I had dozed off with a book propped on my chest when a sound woke me.
I didn't move, listening to see if I heard it again. There was nothing for several seconds. Then I heard it again, a soft scratching sound, coming from our balcony.
We lived on the fourth floor of our building. It was dark out, but our balcony, like all the others at the complex, overlooked the small courtyard, if you could even call it that. Theoretically, no one should have been able to climb up without being seen…
I heard the sound again. I turned off the light behind my head, let my eyes adjust, and waited to see if I heard it again.
There it was.
I eased off the sofa as silently as possible. We had vertical blinds covering the sliding glass door. The blinds were closed, and I knew the door was locked because no one had been out there since we got home from the mountains.
We had two doors to the main balcony, the one in the living room and the one in my bedroom. There was a second, private balcony outside Kevin's room. I went there, slid the blinds open, and looked out the door. I still couldn't see anything. We had guns, but they were locked in a safe, and I didn’t want to take the time to open it. I picked up the baseball bat that Kevin had propped in the corner of his room. I moved the bar that prevented the door from being opened, unlocked the door as quietly as I could, and stepped out onto the balcony.
I had to look around the corner from Kevin's balcony to the main one. There was a figure crouched at the base of the door that led into my bedroom.
I eased back into Kevin's bedroom, slid the door closed as silently as possible, got the phone from the bedside table, and dialed 911.
"911, what is your emergency?"
"There's someone trying to break in my apartment."
The dispatcher read off my address then asked for my apartment number and the details of what was happening. She kept me on the line until I saw the reflection of flashing lights in the parking lot, then hung up. I went to the door and let the officer in. His partner and another pair of officers were on the ground below our balcony. The officer in the apartment went to Kevin's balcony and looked around.
The guy was gone.
The officer holstered his gun,
which he had pulled out when entering Kevin's bedroom. "He probably got scared off when he saw our lights. We'll search on foot down there." He went into my bedroom, opened the blinds and the door, and stepped out. "Yep, here we go. He was trying to use this cutting tool." He held up a thing that looked like a protractor from high school geometry and pointed to a set of circular scratches beside the door handle. "It still wouldn't have gotten him in because the bar is in place, but it would have gotten him started." He called for forensics. "We'll have the evidence guys come and see if they can pull up anything. You never know. Maybe he's not a very bright burglar." He pointed at the baseball bat, which I was still clutching. "You know how to use that thing?"
"Yes, sir. I was a Little League home run champion."
He grinned. "Where'd you play?"