Cited to Death

by Meg Perry

  So I called Kevin. His phone went to voicemail, too. I left him a longer message, telling him where I was, what Ben's text had said, and that Pete's car was here and he wasn't answering his phone. Then I texted him - "911 - Check your voicemail asap."

  I locked the car and went inside.

  I took the stairs to the third floor. If anything bad was happening, I wanted to be able to come in through the back of the lab. I eased the door open and stuck my head through. The hallway was deserted. I could only see enough of the back door of the lab to see that there were lights on in there. The door to Dr. Oliver's office was to my immediate right; I tested the handle. Locked. I crossed the hall and put my ear to the door of the lab. I could hear voices, although I couldn't make out what they were saying.

  There were two voices. One was male - low, calm. Pete's voice.

  The other voice was raised and agitated.

  And it was female.

  Oh, shit.

  I tried the handle of the door, very slowly and quietly. It didn't turn. I was going to have to go to the front door of the lab.

  I sent Kevin another text. "I'm at lab. Can hear Pete and a woman. She sounds upset. I'm going in." I turned my phone to silent mode and slid it into my pocket.

  I went to the front door of the lab and tested the doorknob. It turned. I slowly, quietly eased the door open a crack and peeked in.

  And found myself looking right down the barrel of a gun.

  The door opened the rest of the way. Alana Wray backed up, keeping the pistol she was holding leveled at my face. "Finally. Get in here."

  I went in.

  "Turn around. Hands on your head."

  I did what she said. She stuck the barrel of the gun right at the base of my skull, kicked the door closed and locked it.

  What I saw sent a paralyzing jolt through me.

  Ben Goldstein was slumped in the far corner of the lab, covered in blood from a head wound. Pete was in the center of the room, his wrists handcuffed behind him, locked around a supporting beam.

  I looked at Pete. He narrowed his eyes and shook his head very slightly. Don't do anything stupid.

  Wray gave me a little shove in the back. "Move. Down that aisle." She motioned me to the aisle one over from where Pete was chained to the post. "Turn around."

  I turned and noted that Wray was wearing latex gloves. Wonderful. I took another look at the gun. A small .38. It occurred to me at that moment that we might not make it out of this. I prayed that Kevin was on his way.

  Because Alana Wray was pissed. She was breathing fast and sweating and her face was flushed. She glared at me and yelled, practically spitting. "This is all your fault!"

  "My fault?"

  "Yes, your fault! You and Christensen! You...you...fucking librarians! You couldn't leave well enough alone, could you? Either one of you? Had to go snooping around in things that weren't your business. No one was getting hurt, no crimes were committed, but the two of you just couldn’t let it go!"

  I tried to look with my peripheral vision for anything I could use as a weapon. There was some glassware sitting on the countertops. Maybe I could palm something. "You've sure committed some crimes now. How did you kill Dan?"

  "I injected him with potassium. Right through one of the holes left over from those ridiculous piercings. That should have ended it." She was pacing a little bit now, but not lowering the gun. I still didn't think I could make a move to do anything without getting shot. "How did you find out about it, anyway?"

  I couldn’t think of a reason not to tell her. "He mailed me a letter with the two citations and asked me to look into it."

  She stopped pacing for a second and pointed the gun back directly at me. "I was monitoring all the mail going out of his office. How did he get it to you?"

  "The postmark was Malibu."

  She snorted. "Mailed from Ben's house. Should have known." She started pacing again, muttering to herself.

  I needed to keep her talking, to try to keep her off balance if I could. But I didn't want to make her so mad that she'd just shoot me. "Who is Andy Mitchell to you?"

  She stopped, surprised, then sneered. "Well, aren't you the smart one. Andy is my nephew. My older sister’s son. For a little extra cash he was more than happy to monitor your computer for me."

  "UCLA knows about that. He's going to lose his job."

  She waved the gun, almost airily. "Not my problem."

  So much for family ties. "What did Ben find out?"

  "He found out that I'd been married before. And that my previous married name was Collinsworth. And that there had been an Alana Collinsworth doing a postdoctoral fellowship in fertility medicine in Oxford in 2002."

  Damn. It hadn't occurred to me to investigate her background that closely. "How'd he find that out?"

  "Tristan told him, the old fool."

  "Where is Dr. Oliver? Do you have him tied up somewhere too?"

  She laughed. "Of course not. I need him. He's gone to Seattle for the weekend."

  "Does he know about the plagiarism?"

  "Don't be ridiculous. That old fart wouldn't know a stem cell if it showed up in his oatmeal. I don’t think he even read the article we supposedly co-wrote. He's here for fundraising purposes, nothing else."

  Wray was calming down, but she was also relaxing her guard a bit. I spotted a long test tube lying on the counter near the edge. If I could get her to look away from me, I could snatch it quickly. "Is Ben dead?"

  She looked over at him; I swiftly palmed the test tube and tried to curl my fingers around it without being obvious. "No, he's still breathing. For now."

  She was going to kill us, no doubt. I had to stall her. Kevin would come. "So what's your plan here?"

  That got her mad again. "I had a plan, and your boyfriend here wrecked it! So now I have to get rid of all three of you!" She stopped and took a deep breath. "The plan was that Ben would text you, you would come here and identify him as the plagiarist, you and he would struggle, the gun would go off and kill Ben, and you'd be overcome by his cologne and die. He -" she waved the gun at Pete, "wasn't supposed to be involved at all. Now I have to come up with something else."

  Pete hadn't spoken to this point; now he did. "Why not just shoot us all and flee the country?"

  What the fuck was he thinking? I stared at him. He looked back at me and shook his head slightly again.

  Wray focused on him. I used the opportunity to move a couple of feet closer to a rack full of test tubes on the counter to my right. "Because I have to keep the lab open. I can't let any of this interfere with my research."

  Pete was using his calm, reasonable psychologist voice. "Aren't there easier ways to make money?"

  Wray screamed so loudly it startled me and I almost dropped the large test tube. "It's not about the money!" If there was anyone in this end of the building, they'd hear her. Hell, they might have heard her in the parking lot.

  Pete didn't raise his voice. "So what is it about?"

  Wray advanced on Pete a bit. I took the chance of gently sliding the rack of test tubes closer to the edge of the counter. "It's about the research! The procedure will work! We're close! We just have to keep working at it, which means the lab has to stay open, which means I can't be implicated in any of this!"

  Pete was taking over the conversation so I could move around more. "But..."

  "Shut up!" More screaming. “Fucking men. You have no idea what it's like."

  "What what's like? Tell me."

  “Trying to keep me talking, eh?” She laughed bitterly. "Okay, fine. You have no idea what it's like to want a child. A child of your own. A child with your own genes. A child that isn't supposed to be possible because your ovaries were removed years ago." Her voice caught in a near-sob. "This research is my chance. If I can create ova from my own stem cells, I can have a child. My own child, in every way."

  Whoa. I figured it wouldn't be wise to suggest adoption. Pete asked, "So why plagiarize Hughes and Llewellyn's work? I don't
understand why you couldn't have just built on their work rather than stealing it outright."

  “Because I didn’t have time!” Yelling again. “The grant money was only going to fund us for two years. We needed results by that time or the funding would disappear. We were nowhere near producing results on our own. So I had to fake them, and it was easier to do it with Hughes’s article. It was in Welsh. No one would ever have known.” She waved the gun around some more. "Those fucking bastards wouldn't add me as an author on their pathetic article. I worked in that lab right along with them, and they gave me no credit for it whatsoever. They didn't want to tarnish my name with failure, they said. Bullshit! They had no imagination at all. I offered Llewellyn a job, here, and he wouldn't take it. I gave him two chances, and he said no to both of them. So it was his fault.”

  Accepting blame was not this woman’s strong suit. I suddenly realized something. “You killed Llewellyn, didn’t you?”

  “The car accident killed him. I just ran him off the road. Hughes had the good graces to have a heart attack on his own before I published my article. Saved me the trouble of going back to Oxford to deal with him." She glared at me. "You're one of them, aren't you? Uptight Oxford misogynist bastards?"

  "I went to Oxford. None of that other stuff." She was focusing back on me now. I moved to the other side of the aisle, away from Pete, and she circled around the end of the lab bench after me.

  "Thought so. I think I’ll just kill you now." She reached into the pocket of her lab coat.

  Shit. I thought of one more tactic. “You learned a lot about me from my work computer, but you didn’t learn everything. Do you know that my brother is an LAPD homicide detective?”

  Her head jerked up, and she stared at me, then laughed. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Oh, it’s true. You’re not so damn smart, as it turns out. My big brother is Detective Kevin Brodie, West LA division. And my boyfriend is his former partner. So you’re about to murder an ex-cop and the brother of a cop. LAPD is going to be on you like fleas on a dog. You won’t get away with killing us, so why do it?”

  “Oh, I think I’ll get away with it.” She pulled her hand out of her pocket and showed me a bottle of Drakkar Noir cologne.

  I blanched, and she saw it. "Oh, yeah. The doctor that treated you in the emergency room was very thorough. This is exactly the same cologne that caused your attack last week." She seemed more relaxed now, and I didn’t think that was a good thing. "I’ve worked out what’s going to happen here. A ménage a trois. So sad. Ben, as it turns out, was our plagiarist. Dan found out about it and was investigating, so Ben killed him. But Dan had told you, and you uncovered the articles. Although you suspected Tristan, Ben was nervous. He decided he needed to get rid of you as well, so he lured you here. But Ferguson intercepted the text and thought you were meeting Ben for a tryst. He came to confront Ben, but Ben had a gun, forced boyfriend to handcuff himself to the post, then shot him. You arrived, found your boyfriend dead, went crazy, attacked Ben, and were overcome by his cologne.” She walked over to Ben and sprayed a considerable amount of the cologne on his upper body. The scent started wafting toward me, and I felt my airways start to react. “Ben, poor soul, faced with the carnage, knew he’d never get away with it, so he shot himself in the head.” She turned back to me and advanced, spraying as she came.

  I heard sounds out in the hallway. Someone was yelling, and there were feet running. Pete started yelling for help. I picked up the rack of test tubes and threw it at her. She ducked, but got nicked by some broken glass. She screeched and ran at me, emptying the bottle as she came. I buried my nose in my bent elbow and turned to run. I didn't realize that there was a step stool in my path, and I tripped over it. I righted myself, but that gave her just enough time to catch up to me. She yanked my arm away from my face and hit me full force with the spray, emptying the bottle. She dropped it and ran for the back door of the lab.

  I couldn't hold my breath any longer, and I had to breathe in some of the perfume. She'd soaked my shirt with it pretty thoroughly. I felt my airways start to react and started to wheeze. And in my haste, I’d forgotten to bring an inhaler with me. With the condition I was already in, it didn't take long for me to tip over into a full blown attack. I was really starting to have trouble breathing now. I bent over at the waist, but it didn't help. I was losing ground fast. I dragged myself to the aisle and got on my hands and knees, then started crawling to the front door of the lab. There was pounding on the door and more shouting. I collapsed face down on the ground. I heard a crash, a gunshot, and a scream. And then I was gone.

  Saturday June 9

  It was dark.

  I was alone.

  It wasn't completely dark.

  There was light leaking around the curtains in front of me.

  There were curtains.

  I was in a room.

  A very small room.

  I was sitting up, partially.

  There was a rhythmic hissing sound coming from just behind me.

  My eyes began to adjust.

  I tried to look to my right, but I couldn't move my head very far.

  There was something pinching my finger.

  I tried to raise my hand to look at it, and I couldn't.

  There was something in my mouth.

  I tried to swallow and couldn't.

  I tried to breathe, and heard the hissing sound again.

  Huh.

  I went back to sleep.

  The next time I opened my eyes, there was more light. There was also someone in my room.

  A young woman in mint green scrubs was to my right, making notations on a clipboard. She looked down at me, and smiled. "Well, hi there."

  I tried to say something but couldn't. There was something in my mouth. And there was that hissing sound again.

  "Don't try to talk. You've got a tube down your throat." The young woman leaned on the rail on my bed. "My name's Melissa. I'm your nurse today. You're in the intensive care unit at UCLA hospital. You've been here since last night." She patted my arm. "I want you to blink once for yes, twice for no. Can you do that?"

  I blinked once.

  "Great. Do you remember what happened to you?"

  Did I? Oh, yeah. Alana Wray in the lab with a bottle of cologne. I blinked once.

  "Excellent." She smiled down at me. "You're doing great. You're breathing on your own, and your oxygen levels are getting better. The ventilator is just helping you out to rest your breathing muscles. Are you having any discomfort anywhere?"

  Actually, no. I blinked twice.

  "Great." She patted me again. "Your family is all out in the waiting room. Would you like to see one of them?"

  I blinked once.

  "Okay. I'll go get them." She pushed aside the curtain at the foot of my bed and left. It turned out there wasn't a wall there, just a curtain. I could see a piece of counter with someone sitting behind it at a computer, and a clock. 10:30. Was that AM or PM? No way to tell in here. But she said I'd been here since last night - maybe it was AM now.

  Melissa reappeared, with Pete in tow, his arm in a sling.

  Oh wow. I'd felt curiously calm until now, but the sight of Pete ended that. I tried to reach out to him and realized my hands were tied down.

  Melissa untied me quickly. "Sorry about that. We didn't want you to wake up confused and try to pull your tube out." She patted Pete on the shoulder. Lots of patting going on. "I can give you ten minutes. Oh, and he blinks once for yes, twice for no." She left, pulling the curtain closed again.

  I reached out again. Pete took the hand without the IV in and held it against his chest while he kissed me on the forehead. He looked awful - rumpled, scruffy, red-eyed. I'd never seen a more beautiful sight.

  His voice was rough. "You scared the shit out of me."

  I blinked once.

  "How do you feel? Oh, that's not yes or no. Are you feeling bad?"

  Not too bad, considering. I blinked twice.

  He let go
of the hand that had the oxygen meter on it and brushed my hair off my forehead. "You're doing fine, they say. Your doctor will be in later, and they'll probably take you off the machine."

  I blinked once.

  "You probably want to know what happened, huh?"

  I sure did. I blinked once, and nodded as much as I could.

  "Kevin and Tim broke through the door as you were going down. Kevin tackled Wray as she turned to shoot me and knocked off her aim.”