by G. H. Ephron
“And he had you, didn’t he?” I said gently. “What did he need from you?”
Emily seemed flustered. “I have no idea. He came to me out of the blue. Offered me a position at the lab. Said he’d heard about my Ph.D. thesis on cognition and dementia. I was so pleased.” Emily’s face reddened. “Flattered.” She looked away. “I thought he needed a diligent researcher. But there’s a million of us out there he could have picked. Why me?”
She shifted in her chair and picked at a thread in the pants of the jumpsuit. “From the first day I’m working there, he’s telling me how nice I look, how nice I smell. He’d ask me to stay late, and then he’d have to work late, too. His passion and determination to find a cure for Lewy body dementia drew me in. I got this idea in my head, this fantasy, that I’d be able to help him in his quest. That maybe we’d even be partners.
“Then the post-doc at the Pearce came through and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I had not one but two fantastic opportunities. And at last I’d have enough money to get myself some decent clothes. I could finally afford a down payment on my dream car. I was euphoric.
“I’d been there a few weeks when he starts putting his hands where they don’t belong. I tried to tell him nicely that I wasn’t interested in him. Not in that way. When that didn’t work, I was more direct.”
“Must’ve shocked the hell out of him,” I said. Emily smiled. “Did he stop coming on to you?”
“It got much more subtle. It was as if he began a campaign to win me over. There were gifts and kindnesses. Really just bribes. So he’d feel entitled to ask for something in return. I’m sure he thought, sooner or later, I’d come around.”
“What did Dr. Pullaski make of your relationship with Dr. Shands?”
“I think she wrote me off, like I was just some kind of a bimbo. Nothing I did or said made any difference. She made it very clear that I was not the first, and I wouldn’t be the last. I’m sure she thought we were sleeping together.
“Kyle wanted me to quit. I should have. But I guess, in a way, Dr. Shands did seduce me. More than anything, I wanted to be able to say I’d worked there, helped the great doctor with his research. I was thrilled when he gave me a credit on one of his papers. Not that I didn’t deserve it. I wrote most of it. Still, everyone in the lab was shocked.
“He is a genius, you know. His work is brilliant. Patients who come to him see this great man whose work is going to save them. If there’s any possibility that someone was killing his patients, then something has to be done about it.”
Interesting, the way she’d phrased it: someone was killing his patients. The obvious suspect would be Shands himself. But why would he kill his own patients? Weren’t they more valuable to him alive, as research subjects to test his experimental protocol? The only thing a corpse could do was confirm the diagnosis.
“Right now the police are taking the path of least resistance and building a case against you. If we can convince them that this is not just a single murder, or even two, but a pattern of suspicious deaths, then they’ll have to investigate. I’ve got the list of patients from the obituaries and death notices you found. We want to show that each of them died soon after their last appointment at the MRI lab. How do we find out?”
“That’s easy. The information is in the computer system, of course. It’s also in the patient files. Those are in the records room.”
“Show me where,” I said, handing Emily pen and paper.
She drew a map of the imaging center. There was the building lobby, the outer waiting area, the reception area in the center hub. Off that, she drew the corridor with Shands’s office and the neuropathology lab. Then she drew the corridor that led to the scan room. On one side was the storeroom. Across the hall she drew two rooms. One she marked PRIVATE, the other RECORDS.
“Here. They keep it locked. There’s a keypad with a combination lock.” She wrote down a series of six numbers: 0-4-0-1-5-5. “It’s easy to remember. Dr. Shands’s birthday.” April Fool’s Day, 1955. I could remember that.
Emily pulled out the band that was holding her ponytail, brushed her hair back with her fingers and bound it again, this time up high on the back of her head. It was a small thing, but spoke to a change in her outlook.
23
“THAT’S A pretty big if,” Annie said when I told her my plan that afternoon in her office.
The room was strictly functional—a sturdy metal desk, four file cabinets, and some chairs, all dwarfed by the high ceiling and huge arched window. On a bookcase was a stack of take-out menus, some family snapshots, and a framed black-and-white photo of Annie speed skating, her inline skates a blur.
“You might be able to get in there on the pretext of asking Shands to show you your MRI again. But leave you alone long enough so you can sneak around and find the information we need in some file cabinet?” Her look said: Doomed to failure.
“And why would he let you come back at this point? Wouldn’t he want to keep you as far away from the place as he can, especially if he’s trying to hide something like a string of accidents or murders?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. I’d been about to tell Annie why Shands would be eager to see me—that he thought I had Lewy body dementia and wanted to sign me up for his study.
“Peter, what aren’t you telling me?” she said, giving me her X-ray look.
“I didn’t tell you about this because I thought you had enough on your plate with Uncle Jack so sick. Shands saw something in my MRI. He wants me to participate in his research study. He thinks I’ve got Lewy body dementia.”
Annie gaped at me. “You’re only forty years old. How the hell—?”
“He says the markers are there before the symptoms manifest. Shands says I’m at the lower end of the range for normal, upper end of the range for Lewy body dementia.”
“Lower…upper,” Annie muttered. “Mumbo jumbo. In other words, he can’t tell.”
“It can be inherited. My father and uncle both had dementia.”
Annie stared deep into my eyes, then reached out and touched my face.
“You’re taking this seriously, aren’t you? Peter, this is a man whose life work is this disease. He’s looking for people he can use for his research. He wants to see it. If you ask me, he’s got his head up his ass.”
This was hardly the reaction I’d expected. It blew over me like a gust of air from an open window.
“And don’t you dare start living your life as if you’re about to unravel. It’s not going to happen,” Annie said. Then a slow smile came over her face. “But that’s not what you’re going to tell Dr. Shands. Give him what he wants. You’re all worried. You want to do everything you can to prevent the onset of this terrible disease. You can’t wait to enroll in his research study. You’re interested in the brain, so of course you want to see your MRI again.”
Her face clouded. “Promise me you won’t let them give you another MRI. Or a shot, or a pill—or anything. Because if you do, I’ll kill you.”
I put up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
“Shands has the attention span of a gnat,” she said. “That’ll work in our favor. Just hang in there, ogling that scan. Bet you anything, after five minutes he leaves you alone with it.”
“So far so good. Then what? You’re the one who knows how to snoop around. All I know how to do is muck about in people’s heads.”
“First thing, don’t get caught.”
“I’ll try.”
Annie put her hand on my arm. “Seriously, Peter. Be careful. Two people have been killed, maybe more than thirty. Every day patients are coming out of there a whole lot sicker than they went in.”
“I’m delighted you decided to participate in the study,” Shands told me.
He’d made time for me early the next morning. I’d signed the consent form, and he’d already handed me a packet of pills with instructions for taking them.
“You’re our youngest subject with the inherited form o
f the disease. You’ll be helping us to break new ground.” I’m sure he thought that would cheer me up.
In my pocket, I had the map Emily had drawn along with the Xeroxed copy of the table Annie had put together listing all the patients. With the information we’d gathered from family interviews and death certificates, it was turning out that more and more patients had succumbed to respiratory illness, flu, or bacterial infection. I’d have needed an actuary or Shands’s Cray T3E to tell whether the proportion was typical for this kind of population. I reminded myself that the whole point of coming here was to find out when each of those patients had his or her last appointment at the lab.
“How’s Dr. Ryan?” Shands asked, looking as if he’d suddenly developed a headache. “Such a shame. A young woman with so much promise.”
“You think she’s guilty of two murders?” I asked. “You knew her fairly well.”
“Well, I, uh…” Shands stammered, “I didn’t know her that well.”
“I thought she even authored a paper with you.”
“Dr. Ryan assisted,” he said shifting uncomfortably. “I gave her a credit. I often do that. Help young people who are starting out.”
“Mentoring can be very satisfying,” I said. “Actually, I’m feeling a bit like a student again myself—there’s so much to learn about magnetic resonance imaging.” I tried to look sincere. “I hope you don’t mind going over my brain scan one more time.”
“It’s a pleasure to talk to someone who appreciates the science behind this. I remember the first time I saw my own. Practically an out-of-body experience.” He chuckled at the lame joke. I managed a weak smile.
I followed him to the control room. We sat at what I thought of as Philbrick’s computer. Soon Shands had opened a window on the screen and my brain was floating in it.
“Let’s get a better look,” he said, enlarging the window.
He ran through the scan, slowing it down to show me what he considered the key indicators. I feigned rapt interest but tried not to pay close attention. The choice was mine whether to see what he saw, and I preferred not to.
“This is so interesting,” I said when he’d finished his spiel. “Would you mind if I take some time to go through it some more?”
He gave me an indulgent smile. “By all means. Be my guest.”
As Annie had predicted, he hung around for about a minute more and then excused himself.
“Enjoy. Come find me in my office when you’ve had enough.”
At last I was alone. I opened the door to the corridor a crack just to be sure. All quiet. I took a final look at the map Emily had drawn, reminded myself of the combination numbers for the records-room door, and slipped out into the hall.
I peered through the windows in the fire doors up toward the central area. The receptionist was standing there talking to a man in a white coat who was sitting at the counter. I waited until she was gone and the man had returned to his computer.
I’d just pushed through the door and had nearly reached the records room when I heard voices. I ducked into the storage room an instant before Shands and Dr. Pullaski came out of the door across the hall marked PRIVATE. They stood talking quietly for a moment while Dr. Pullaski unlocked the records room next door and let herself in.
I felt my heart pounding in my chest—a minute earlier and I’d have been discovered in the records room, rifling the files. Shands went back inside the private office and I eased myself out from between two six-foot-tall helium canisters. I needed a better place to wait while Dr. Pullaski did whatever she was doing in the records room.
Just then Shands came out into the hall and, without glancing across the hall at me, headed toward his office. I darted across the hall and managed to catch the door just before it clicked shut and slipped inside.
Emily had called it “Bluebeard’s Chamber.” I don’t know what I expected to find, but nothing prepared me for this. The room was small, no more than fifteen feet wide, and it was at least twenty degrees cooler than the hall. It smelled of formalin, and a chirping sound filled the air, as if baby birds were nesting in here.
One wall was lined with stainless-steel standing freezers. A readout on one of the doors said “-82 F.” Not nearly as cold in there as the liquid helium they used to cool the magnets, but plenty cold enough to begin freezing living tissue in a matter of seconds.
I opened the unit and it exhaled a puff of dragon’s breath. When that cleared, I could see an interior half-filled with sealed bags. Just visible through the clear plastic were the squiggly reddish veins that crawl all over the surface of a freshly harvested brain. So that’s what this was—Shands’s own private brain bank. I did a quick count. There were about fifty of them. I closed the freezer.
On the floor were several empty FedEx boxes marked WET ICE, just like the one Shands had found when I’d paid my first visit to the lab. How prosaic, shipping disembodied brains via FedEx.
On the adjacent wall, I found the source of the chirping. There were four shelves of quart-sized glass beakers, each filled with half a brain floating in solution. Each hemisphere was impaled with electrodes like so many meat thermometers. The wires were attached at the opposite ends to small black electronic meters, their needles twitching in time to the sound.
The beakers were each labeled with a date, the most recent one just a few days old. The solution in some of them was bright blue and clear. In others the liquid that had turned cloudy. The oldest brain, nearly a year old, was suspended in a brown, semi-opaque solution. Most of the brain tissue seemed to have disintegrated.
I stood there gaping. Shands’s research wasn’t confined to a drug trial, periodic MRIs, and postmortems. It looked like he was trying to directly measure cell membrane permeability. Whatever it was that he was doing, it was causing brain tissue to disintegrate rapidly. I remembered Dr. Rofstein’s comment: Brains were being lost at an alarming rate.
A regulated brain bank would never have allowed it. Brains were their most precious resource. Slivers of brain tissue were rationed to qualified researchers. No wonder Shands had parted company with the Cambridge Brain Bank. And no wonder he kept this brain bank under wraps.
I heard a thump from next door. Just past the freezers was a connecting door to the records room. I put my ear to it. There were footsteps and a file drawer closing. Apparently Dr. Pullaski was still in there. I hoped she’d finish up soon—Shands would eventually return to check on my whereabouts and when he didn’t find me, he’d come looking. Plus I was getting damned cold.
On the wall there was a large whiteboard with rows and columns ruled off in green marker. Across the top, columns were labeled, “<0,” “50 to 60,” “60 to 70,” “70 to 80,” and finally “>80.” Age ranges, I assumed. Down the side, the two rows were labeled MALE, FEMALE.
The table had names written in it. There in the middle of the table, in the seventy-to-eighty male slot, was the name Frank Mosticcio. These were patients, and this was the grand plan Emily had told me about, the one Shands used to target his research. It was just another example of the man’s hubris—standard practice at research labs was to use patient ID numbers, not names. But then, this was not your standard brain bank. This locked room was a private sanctuary, and within these walls he could do whatever he damn well pleased.
I thought I heard a door slam. I listened again at the connecting door. Now I heard nothing. Had she left? I needed a peephole.
There was a heavy metal bolt on the door, locking it in place. I pulled on it, but the bar resisted. A little three-in-one oil would have done the trick.
I took my handkerchief from my pocket and wadded it over the end of the bolt, then pressed against it as hard as I could. Slowly, reluctantly, the bolt slid open. I twisted the knob and pulled the door open just a crack. Still no sounds. I nudged the door open wider until I could see into a long narrow room lined with file cabinets. No sign of Dr. Pullaski.
I put a wastebasket in the threshold and slipped into the records room. I fou
nd the two file cabinets marked PATIENT RECORDS and pulled one open. Neatly typed labels marched alphabetically on tabs from front to back. Getting the information I wanted would be a piece of cake.
I worked my way through my list, beginning with Anna Abels. Her last appointment had been four days before her death. Could be just a coincidence. Still, I felt my pulse quicken with anticipation.
I looked up the second name. His death had been three days after an MRI. I jotted down the information and quickly moved on. The next patient, a woman, had also died within a few days of a visit to the lab.
As I opened up file after file, outrage coursed through me. How dare Shands pervert medical research in this way? Taking advantage of vulnerable people. Not to mention how, when this became public, it would set back medical research. As it was, not nearly enough people donated their organs.
I was on the next-to-last name when I froze, alert, thinking I heard a noise in the hall. It was hard to tell over the hum of the freezer units and the chirp of the meters coming from the next room. I shut the file drawer and put the list back in my pocket. I had enough data, and there was no point in taking unnecessary risks.
I ducked back into the brain bank. The bolt balked at going back into place. I was struggling with it when I noticed a box just sticking out under the freezer beside me. I edged it out with my foot. It looked like a metal cash box. The lock had been smashed and the top of the box sat unevenly on the base. I nudged the top off with my toe.
It was an odd jumble of stuff. A used tissue with lipstick on it. A pair of women’s underpants. I squatted to get a closer look. What looked like a wad of chewed gum. There were also some slips of yellow paper—“Freudian Slips,” like the ones Emily used. I picked up one of them. “Thanks for your help!” it said, then a smiley face and the letter E. Another said, “Back at 2:30. Emily.” Innocuous notes left for a coworker. It wouldn’t have been hard to transform one of these, one that said “See you at 6—Emily,” add a few Xs to make it look personal, then tuck it into Kyle’s gym bag and leave it for the police to find.