Cited to Death

by Meg Perry

  One of the people looked up at our entry and walked toward us. Smiling, of course. Then she saw me, and her jaw dropped in recognition at exactly the same moment as mine. It was the flirting woman from the pool. She was wearing jeans and a turtleneck under her long, white lab coat. Her streaked blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She recovered first. “Hey. You’re the early morning swimmer.”

  I wasn’t recovering from my shock very quickly. “Yeah…um…” I held my hand out. “Jamie Brodie.”

  She took my hand and held it warmly. “Alana Wray. Isn’t this a coincidence!” She seemed delighted.

  No. Fucking. Way.

  Dr. Oliver looked intrigued; Pete looked confused. Oliver asked, “Have you met before?”

  Dr. Wray let go of my hand and put her hands on her hips, tilting her head the same way she had the other day. Still flirting? “We have, very briefly, at the UCLA pool Monday morning. Remember, Tristan, we had that lunch meeting with the board, and I had to swim in the morning? This lovely young man welcomed me to the morning swim.”

  Oliver rubbed his hands together. “Well! How serendipitous!”

  Not exactly the word I would have used. But I wasn’t sure what word I would use. Where was Clinton when you needed him?

  Pete and Dr. Wray introduced themselves and shook hands. Wray beamed at both of us. “Welcome, both of you! We don’t get many visitors.”

  "Thank you for letting us interrupt your day." Pete had recovered, but his expression was guarded.

  "Oh, no problem. You're not interrupting." She turned to Oliver. "Tristan, would you like me to show them around?"

  I was watching Oliver, mostly so I didn’t have to look at Wray or Pete. Oliver seemed a bit uncomfortable with the idea of Wray giving us the tour. "No, thank you, I'll take care of it." It was subtle, but his attitude hinted at being patronizing. Hmm.

  It didn't seem to bother Dr. Wray much. She shrugged and smiled at me, as if to say what are you gonna do? "Sure, no problem. Let me know if you have any questions." She went back to the station she'd left when we came in.

  Oliver walked us toward the back of the room. "Here's where the process starts." He pointed out a couple of machines and talked vaguely about what they did, and specifically about how much they had cost. Pete made encouraging sounds; I looked around. We walked around the end of the last lab bench. "And here's one of our associates. Dr. Ben Goldstein. Ben, these gentlemen from UCLA have expressed an interest in our work."

  Ben saw me, and his mouth dropped open. Lots of that going around today. He shut it quickly, but he was ashen.

  He was not pleased to see us.

  Interesting.

  Oliver kept going, and we walked past Ben, then stopped at the bench behind him. I could still see him from this angle. Oliver was talking about the machines, and Pete was responding, carrying most of the conversation. I was trying to spend my time looking around as much as possible. Ben was still at his work station, but he was following us with his eyes. Dr. Wray was up at the front of the lab, talking to a couple of the other workers. I wondered if there were other physicians working here or if the rest of the people were lab techs.

  I was studying the mechanism of a centrifuge when I heard Pete ask, "Are you treating any patients yet?"

  Dr. Oliver looked very uncomfortable. "Not just yet. We're not quite to that stage. We're still working on our procedure for in vivo testing. We have some way to go before we get there."

  Jeez. How many different ways were there to say no?

  Dr. Wray must have overheard; she walked back to our area. "As you can imagine, it's a very big step. Our procedure is the first in what has to be a series of successful steps before we're ready to fertilize one of the ova that we've created." She smiled at us. "We're putting the finishing touches on the perfection of our procedure. We should be ready to move ahead to the next step within the next six months."

  "Ah." Pete nodded sagely. "That sounds very encouraging."

  He and Wray continued to chat a bit; Oliver continued to look uncomfortable. I got the impression that he really might not know much about what was going on in his own lab. Interesting.

  Ben was still glowering off to the side, although he'd stopped watching us so closely.

  Dr. Wray went back to her work. Dr. Oliver turned back to us. "Well, gentlemen, that's our grand tour. Is there anything else I can show you?"

  He hadn't actually shown us much of anything. I now knew how much one of his machines would cost, but I didn’t know anything more about his procedures than I’d learned from reading his article.

  "No, thank you. This was very helpful. I understand much more now about what you're doing." Pete shook his hand.

  I reached out as well. "Thank you for your time. We really appreciate it."

  Dr. Oliver beamed as he showed us to the door. He certainly seemed relieved to be done with our questioning. "No trouble at all, gentlemen. No trouble at all. If you have any more questions, Dr. Ferguson, please contact me." He gave Pete one of his cards. It was printed on top-grade paper stock. "I look forward to hearing from you."

  Dr. Wray waved as we left. Ben didn't move from his stool.

  We didn't say anything to each other until we were into the car. Pete locked the doors and started the engine, then looked at me. “What the fuck? You’d met her?”

  “I had no idea who she was on Monday. We didn’t exchange names. She said she usually swam at lunch, and she gave the same reason to Oliver today that she’d given to me on Monday.” I shrugged. “How could that be a setup?”

  Pete looked out the windshield, shaking his head. “I don’t know. But I don’t like coincidences.”

  “I know, I don’t either. But there aren’t that many public pools in West LA; maybe she lives nearby and she really does swim at lunch on a regular basis.”

  “Maybe.” Pete shook his head again. "I have to think about that for a while. What did you think of the tour?"

  "I think Oliver talked a lot and didn't say very much. And he looked very uncomfortable when you started asking about treating patients."

  "Yeah, he did." Pete pulled out of the parking lot and pointed the Jeep in the direction of UCLA. "He may have thought that I wouldn't have been as eager to give money if they weren't ready to produce any tangible results. Tangible results being babies."

  "Maybe. I also thought that Ben Goldstein was really unhappy to see us."

  "Oh, yeah. Very unhappy. The only one that was cool with it, and the most forthcoming, was Dr. Wray."

  "Yeah. She also seemed to be the one who really knows what’s going on in the lab."

  "That's probably how they divide up the work. Oliver takes care of the fundraising and Wray takes care of the lab."

  "Mmm hmm." I thought for a minute. "I wonder what Goldstein's role is? He didn't move from his workstation while we were there, but it didn't seem like Oliver or Wray expected him to."

  Pete shrugged. "He seemed to me to be just another employee."

  "Yeah, maybe. He's the link to Dan, though. I'm not comfortable with that."

  "Me either."

  My follow up appointment with my primary care doctor was at 11:00. Pete pulled up to the entrance to the medical plaza at 10:30. “How about I meet you for dinner?”

  “I have class tonight, my final class meeting. It starts at 5:30.”

  “Okay, then say 4:00? That’ll give us plenty of time to get something on campus.”

  “Okay. Sounds good.” I gave Pete a smile. “Thanks for all this. I really appreciate it.”

  “Don’t mention it. I’ll see you at four.” Pete drove off in plenty of time to get to his 11:15 class.

  In Dr. Weikal’s office, I checked email on my laptop while I waited. I got called back to the exam room about fifteen minutes after my scheduled appointment. Dr. Weikal came in almost immediately. He asked me how I was feeling, ran my lung function tests, listened to my chest. He pronounced me nicely improved from Monday and told me to keep taking the medicatio
ns and taking steamy showers and staying away from irritants. He had me schedule another appointment for a week from today, when I would have been off the steroid pills for a couple of days.

  It was nearly noon, and I was hungrier than usual – a side effect of the steroids. I stopped at the student center to get a sandwich, then walked up to Wilson Plaza to eat. I finished up and headed for my office, getting there about 12:30. I had 30 minutes before my reference shift. I said hello to everyone, sent Dr. Loomis my sick leave forms for Monday, yesterday and this morning, sorted through the mail, and locked my laptop in my filing cabinet. I still didn’t have a desktop computer, but that was okay.

  At 1:30, Clinton arrived. Liz said, “Hi, Clinton.”

  “The word of the day is bathetic.” He bowed and walked away.

  “That one sounds familiar.” Liz looked it up. “I thought so. Displaying insincere emotion.”

  Heh. Kind of like Dr. Oliver this morning, pretending to be so pleased to see us. All he’d really wanted was Pete’s money.

  After reference, there was nothing on my calendar. I decided to try to finish up the unscrambling of the Welsh article.

  I started putting the sentences together. It was slow going. It took me nearly a half hour to get through the review of literature. As I’d noted with the methodology, a lot of the terminology and phrases seemed similar to the ones in Oliver’s article. It still didn't strike me as unusual.

  Until I got to the results section.

  I’d paid close attention to the results section of Oliver’s article. Even though I didn't understand some of the terminology, I thought I had the basic idea of what had been done and how it had turned out.

  And the results section of the Welsh article sounded a lot like the one from Oliver’s article.

  But how was that possible? One procedure hadn't worked, one had. How could the results section be similar?

  I had to make sure. I pulled my copy of Oliver’s article out of my computer bag, and opened it to the results section.

  Not only were they similar, they matched word for word. The only difference was that the negative terms had been removed. All the "did nots" had been changed to "dids." All the "did not reacts" had been changed to "reacted with."

  I was astounded. It occurred to me that I’d never thought to check the references page for a citation of the Welsh article. I flipped to the back of Oliver’s article. There was no citation for Hughes and Llewellyn.

  I turned to the front of Oliver’s article and paged up the screen to the top of the Welsh article, and started comparing. The abstract, like the results section,was identical to Oliver’s article, with the negatives removed. The introductions, reviews of literature, and methodologies were identical, period. The statistics were different - but no, they'd used the same numbers. They'd just juggled the stats, using a higher value of p, to make them match the results they wanted.

  The only section that was different was the discussion. Oliver and the others must have had to rewrite that section. Everything else, they had lifted from Hughes and Llewellyn.

  Oliver’s breakthrough article was completely plagiarized.

  Holy. Fucking. Shit.

  "Holy fucking shit."

  "Excuse me?" I looked up. Pete was standing in the doorway. Was it 4:00 already? It was.

  "Sorry. Sorry. I just figured it out. The entire second article is plagiarized."

  "What?"

  "They stole it. Oliver and the others stole the Welsh article word for word. I wonder if the procedure even works. The numbers are the same. They just doctored them, like you said, to make them fit the results they wanted."

  "So what does that mean?"

  "One thing it means is that these guys have built this very lucrative lab on the basis of stolen research. If the procedure works, then the least they're guilty of is blatant plagiarism. If it doesn't work, then...I guess we're talking about fraud. Although I have no idea what laws they might have broken."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I don't know. I can’t think what to do about this right now. I guess there's some medical board that would handle things like this."

  "Well, you can think while we eat. In the mood for pizza? I was thinking 800 Degrees."

  800 Degrees was just off campus, so I could make it back to my class by 5:30. Since it was early, we got seated right away. We ordered a large pepperoni and mushroom to share. The waiter went off with our order and Pete jumped back into the discussion.

  "So, this plagiarism must be what Dan stumbled across."

  "Yeah. I wonder what tipped him off? Must have been something Goldstein said at some point."

  "Do you think Goldstein was in on the plagiarism?"

  "His name's on the article. Although if he didn't know about the first article, he may not have realized. But I don't know if that's a good enough excuse."

  "There's probably a way to report something to the California medical board online. You may even be able to do it anonymously."

  "Anonymous would be good."

  "Yeah." Pete considered. "You might want to call HALT."

  “HALT?”

  “The LA County Health Authority Law Enforcement Task Force. They investigate anything having to do with any fraudulent medical practice in the county.”

  “I need to find out if all of them were in on it though. I don’t want to accuse anyone falsely.”

  “You could just report them all and let the medical board sort it out.”

  “Yeah, but if I can find out which of them were responsible…”

  “Do you have any thoughts along those lines?”

  “Well, my initial thought would be Oliver. He’s the first author, and I do know that he worked in Cambridge at the same time that the authors of the Welsh article had their lab in Oxford. And he’s the one that came to see me at the library. Which was very odd. I can see Dan’s boyfriend being involved, too. He must have said something to Dan to raise Dan’s curiosity in the first place, right? The woman – Dr. Wray – I don’t know. She co-founded the lab with Oliver, but she may not have known about the research.”

  Pete frowned. “I don’t see how any of them could not know. But the ones that were acting squirrely when we were there this morning were Oliver and Goldstein. Wray, on the other hand, seemed very pleasantly surprised to see you. Not the reaction I’d expect from a criminal.”

  “Right. Oliver’s my first choice for chief perpetrator.”

  “Agreed.” Pete speared a black olive from my plate. “What are you gonna do next?”

  “I don’t know. I need to let this sit in my head for a while.”

  “Okay. Do you want me to pick you up after class?”

  “Nah. I’ll ride the bus. I’m gonna let them out early tonight.”

  After dinner, I went to my classroom, then turned on my laptop and found the website for the Medical Board of California and their Consumer Complaint form. There was a section to report fraud or other "unprofessional conduct." I bookmarked it but didn't fill it in. It wasn't anonymous, and I kept thinking that there might be an innocent explanation for what I’d found. Not that I could conjure one up.

  Even though it was early, I was getting tired. The students arrived, and I gave them their final in-class assignments. Each of them had a different complicated history reference question to answer, which they would write up and turn in by the end of class. I told them that I’d decided that they didn’t have to present their findings tonight. As soon as each one was finished, they could leave and turn in their reports online by tomorrow morning. They were delighted to hear that and jumped right in to work. The last one was done and out the door by 8:15. I packed up and headed for the bus stop.

  It was dusk, but not completely dark. I was thinking while I walked and not paying attention to anything around me. That was my mistake. I was in the shadows, about halfway between the library and the bus stop, when someone bumped into me from behind. I turned, a little off balance, and got sucker punched. I stag
gered, and someone else grabbed me from behind. There were two of them. The first guy punched me again in the side of the head, then in the gut. I folded, and the second guy grabbed my computer bag and tossed it out of the way. The first guy then proceeded to hit me five or six times, mostly in the face, once more in the gut. I tasted blood and went down. I heard running steps, then silence.

  It all took about ten seconds. Neither one of them had said a word.