Fatal Reaction

by Hartzmark, Gini

  “What I want to know is why, when we have Mikos breathing down our necks, are we wasting time on some damn dog and pony show for the Japanese?” demanded Remminger.

  “Because before we make a drug we have to make a deal,” replied Stephen impatiently. “Right now this project, which is at least two years away from having a drug to sell, is burning through money at the rate of sixty-five thousand dollars a day. There’s no way that this company can continue to absorb those costs without some kind of outside revenue. If anyone here knows someone who has forty million dollars they’d like to gamble on this molecule, speak up now. If not, I suggest we think seriously about how we’re going to impress our visitors from Tokyo.” He looked hard around the room and waited for a reply before he continued.

  “During the next several days each lab head will be meeting with Kate Millholland to go over the information and cost projections. Some of you may have already met Kate in her role as outside counsel and member of the company’s board of directors. She has graciously agreed to help us through this negotiation, filling in for the unfortunate vacancy left by Danny Wohl.” While Stephen’s voice had faltered as he’d uttered his dead friend’s name, the other scientists in the room seemed curiously unmoved.

  I nodded to the room at large to acknowledge Stephen’s introduction, but no one took any notice. Attorneys, I was forced to conclude, were definitely not part of the tribe. From the scientist’s perspective, lawyers as a category were a necessary evil—and as such, interchangeable.

  “That’s all very well,” piped a heavily accented German voice from the back, “but while we’re busy showing off to our Oriental friends, aren’t we in danger of giving ourselves away? I mean, what’s to stop Takisawa from taking a peek at what we have so far and going back home and deciding to try their hand on making a new drag themselves?”

  “They won’t do it because the only people who can make this drag are sitting in this room,” pronounced Stephen with more certainty than I knew he felt. From the beginning the negotiation with Takisawa had been one long calculated risk, an elaborate dance of veils with each side seeking to gain the upper hand while revealing tantalizing glimpses of what it wanted and what it was willing to give up to get it.

  “Not meaning to sound like a nervous virgin embarking on a date with a drunken sailor,” ventured Borland, from beneath his walruslike mustache, “but how far do you think it’s safe to go with these guys? I mean, up until now we’ve been signing lab books every day and having our bags searched every time we leave the building. Are you telling us that now you expect us to just lie back and let them lift up our skirts?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” replied Stephen. “We have to do whatever it takes to make them want us. That means clean white lab coats will be required for all personnel.” He stuck his hands deep into his pockets and grinned. “Fishnet stockings will be optional.”

  I had hoped to catch a word with Stephen after the meeting, but the minute it was over he was immediately surrounded by scientists all jockeying for his attention. I decided to try to catch him later and headed back to Danny’s office. It was still so disgustingly early that I figured I’d spend an hour or two getting my bearings. That way by the time I headed back into the city I would have missed the worst of the morning rush hour. My first day Working in Oak Brook and already I was developing a commuter’s obsession with traffic.

  While Danny was in Japan and in the days following his death, a small tide of work had washed up on his desk. Besides the scores of phone messages from people I’d never heard of concerning matters that were completely unknown to me, there were dozens of faxes from Takisawa, some received as recently as that morning, all requesting information in preparation for their upcoming visit. Scanning them, I could see there was nothing Takisawa didn’t want to know about the ZK-501 project in particular and Azor Pharmaceuticals in general. Even taking into account the well-known appetite of the Japanese for detail, their inquiries struck me as excessive. Budgets, both actual and projected, personnel records, and depreciated equipment costs were all respectfully requested as a prelude to further discussions.

  Putting the faxes in my briefcase to take back to Callahan Ross with me, I turned my attention to the mail, which was stacked a foot high. Flipping through the junk mail and the routine correspondence I came upon a certified letter that had been received and signed for in Danny’s absence. I scrabbled in the top drawer of the desk looking for a letter opener and, with a growing sense of dread, slit it open. One look at the contents confirmed my worst fears.

  It was another lawsuit.

  Azor Pharmaceuticals was currently defending itself against a suit involving its newest drug offering, a compound used in the treatment of schizophrenia. Serezine, tortuous to develop and expensive to produce, had been a controversial drug from the first. Azor had taken its hits in the press when it was announced that a year’s treatment with Serezine would cost $10 thousand. Despite the fact that this was only a fraction of what it cost to institutionalize these patients, the media had fed on stories of greedy drug companies for weeks.

  Six months after the drug was first made available, Azor was served with a lawsuit, filed in Texas by plaintiffs alleging that the drug had improved the condition of a previously institutionalized nineteen-year-old man to the point where he could be returned home to his family. Unfortunately, once there, he proceeded to murder both his parents and a furnace repairman who had the bad luck to be in the house at the time. Although it appeared that the patient had stopped taking the drug soon after his discharge from the hospital, Azor had nonetheless already racked up close to $100 thousand in legal fees defending itself.

  As I read through the complaint in my hand my stomach churned. The family of an East Lansing woman was bringing suit alleging that she had become so despondent while taking Serezine that she killed her three-day-old infant, then took her own life. Feeling sick, I dialed Stephen’s extension only to have Rachel tell me smugly that Stephen was in a meeting with the Hemasyn clinical trial group and had left explicit instructions not to be interrupted. Nothing I said was able to sway her, so I hung up the phone and called Callahan Ross to speak to Tom Galloway.

  Tom was the litigator at the firm who was preparing the Texas suit for trial. While Tom and, more important, Azor’s insurer were both convinced the first suit was baseless, the existence of a second suit could under no circumstances be construed as good news. When I got Tom’s secretary on the line she explained that Tom was out of the office for a few days due to a death in the family.

  “Just my luck,” I thought to myself callously as I slammed the receiver into the cradle. Now I had another crisis that was mine to deal with because someone else had inconveniently dropped dead.

  * * *

  I arrived back downtown in a foul temper without having managed to speak to Stephen and with the news of the second Serezine lawsuit nagging at me like a sore tooth. As soon as I got in I had to spend a couple of hours putting out fires in the Nuland Petroleum deal. After that I devoted the rest of the day to a series of thirty-minute meetings with the various associates to whom I was delegating my routine cases. It was nearly four o’clock before I finally found myself with five free minutes for the corned beef sandwich that my secretary had brought me as either a very late lunch or an early dinner. I had managed to wolf down half of it when Cheryl buzzed to say that Elliott Abelman was in reception wanting to know whether I had time to see him. I told her to go ahead and bring him on back, while I quickly consulted the mirror in my top drawer to make sure I didn’t have mustard on my chin.

  “Sorry to just barge in,” said Elliott a few minutes later as he appeared, grinning, in my doorway. He was wearing a blue blazer and khaki pants, radically casual attire for the suit-and-tie environs of Callahan Ross. If it weren’t for the bulge from the Browning automatic he wore holstered under his arm he could easily have been mistaken for a trust-fund brat dropping by to pick up his check. After six months of deliberate av
oidance I found it dis-concerting to find Elliott suddenly, even casually, appearing at my office.

  When he stepped aside to let Cheryl usher in Joe Blades, I sprang to my feet. Blades was a homicide cop and a good friend of Elliott’s from his days in the state’s attorneys office when they had worked the gang crimes I unit together.

  “Detective Blades,” I said, extending my hand in greeting, “this is a very pleasant surprise.”

  Blades was young for homicide and looked nothing like you’d expect for a man who spent most of his working life gazing down upon the newly deceased. Indeed, with his beard and gold-rimmed glasses he had a vaguely professorial air. In point of fact he’d come to the police department from Princeton, of all places, during that brief season when the idea of recruiting for law enforcement from the Ivy League had come briefly into vogue. Unlike most of his cohorts who’d quickly fled the grim realities of the street for the safe haven of law school, Joe Blades had remained. He had found his calling.

  “Come on, make my day, Joe,” I said, folding my hands together on top of my desk once we’d all settled comfortably into our respective chairs. “Please tell me that you’ve been assigned to investigate Danny Wohl’s death.”

  “Right now no one’s been assigned to the case,” replied Blades. “But as it happens I was one of the detectives who took the unattended-death call, so I did work the scene. Elliott tells me your firm represents the company that Mr. Wohl worked for.”

  “Yes. I’m also one of the directors of the company.”

  “So you knew him quite well.”

  “Professionally, yes. We didn’t socialize much outside of the office.”

  Blades shot me a look that said he knew I didn’t have much of a life outside of the office. In the past Blades had tried his hand at playing Cupid between Elliott and me. For a brief flash of time I found myself wondering what Elliott had told him about what had almost happened between the two of us but immediately forced myself to focus on more pressing matters.

  “And I take it from what Elliott tells me,” he continued, “you and Dr. Azorini have questions about his death.”

  “Come on, Joe. You went to the scene. Of course we have questions. From the blood all over everything it seems pretty obvious that Danny didn’t die quietly in his sleep.”

  “So far the medical examiner hasn’t made any ruling as to cause of death.”

  “Has the autopsy been performed yet?”

  “No.”

  “Has it at least been scheduled?”

  “Not that I’m aware.”

  “So tell me, when are they going to get around to it? Once they find a name and a cause of death for Jane Doe Number Sixty-three?” I knew it didn’t make any sense to get sarcastic with a homicide cop, but the thought of what had happened to Danny passing unnoticed galled me.

  “I can’t answer that Kate,” he replied, not unkindly. “But I can tell you what we have so far.”

  Blades pulled a small spiral notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket. As he flipped it open I noticed that besides his scribbled notes there were several drawings of stick figures. It took me a second to realize these were representations of Danny’s body.

  “Mr. Wohl was discovered Monday morning at approximately ten-twenty by the building engineer, who’d let himself into the apartment to check that the heat was on. The weather had turned cold Sunday night and they were having trouble with the furnace in that part of the building. Dispatch took the call at ten thirty-four A.M., and a patrol unit responded immediately. They took one look inside the apartment and got on their radios requesting backups. It was called into homicide at ten thirty-six as a possible fatal stabbing. Art Wypiszinski and I were out interviewing family members of one of Sarrek’s suspected victims and took the call, but we didn’t get there until eleven fifty-one. As soon as we walked in the door we figured we were looking at some kind of dispute between homosexual lovers.”

  “Why is that?” I asked, curious about what would lead him to draw that conclusion so quickly.

  “No motive besides sex produces that kind of overkill,” replied Blades matter-of-factly, “and no woman is strong enough to do that kind of damage to a man. Besides, there was no sign of forced entry, so it seemed likely that the deceased knew his assailant and let him into the apartment. From the blood trail it looked as though Mr. Wohl was on his feet when the attack started and despite sustaining severe injuries, he managed to stay on his feet for several minutes and put up a fight. That would explain not just the blood splatter, but the overturned furniture and the overall condition of the apartment.”

  “Did anybody hear anything?” Elliott asked.

  Blades shook his head. “A canvass of the neighbors turned up nothing. In that kind of building no one knows anybody else. Besides, the victim’s apartment was a corner unit on the top floor of the building. The only wall he shared with another unit was the bedroom and the struggle appeared to have been limited to the front of the apartment.”

  “What about the apartment below?” I demanded.

  “Out of town for the weekend. I’m not sure they would have been able to hear anything because the building is pretty solidly built.” Joe Blades consulted his notes again before continuing. “From the dishes in the sink and the condoms in the wastebasket it looked as though the deceased had recently had company. The condoms had been used two-ply, by the way.”

  “Why is that significant?” I asked, not meaning to sound naive.

  “The condoms had been used two at a time, doubled. It usually indicates that one of the partners had AIDS or was afraid of contracting the disease.”

  “Danny was HIV positive,” I said. “Whether he technically had AIDS is something you’d have to get from his doctor.”

  “Other than that, was he sick?”

  “No. But the anti-AIDS drugs he was taking were giving him a bad time with side effects.”

  “What kind of side effects?”

  “Nausea, weakness, muscle pain. About once every two weeks he’d just feel so crummy he wouldn’t be able to get out of bed and drag himself into the office. That’s why nobody thought anything of it when he didn’t show up to work on Monday morning. He’d just been on a grueling business trip to the Orient. Everyone at Azor just assumed that he wasn’t feeling well.”

  “It’s going to be up to the medical examiner to give us the time of death, but when we got there rigor was already starting to pass off in the upper extremities. By my guess he’d been dead at least twenty-four hours. He didn’t have a history of hemophilia or some other blood-clotting disorders that you know of, did he?”

  “No,” I replied, puzzled. “Why do you keep asking?”

  “When we arrived at the scene the body was lying facedown in the living room a few feet away from the telephone in a large pool of blood. From that position there were no visible wounds, but we figured that once the lab boys were finished and we rolled him over, we’d find the killer’s handiwork all over the victim’s face and chest.”

  “And did you?” I asked.

  “No,” replied Blades, removing his gold-rimmed glasses and slowly polishing them with the fat end of his tie. “When we turned him over there wasn’t a mark on him.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “How is that possible given the condition of the apartment?” I demanded. “There was blood all over the walls and the furniture was turned over. You said yourself you found him lying facedown in a pool of blood. What you’re telling me now makes absolutely no sense.” Blades raised both his hands in the shrug universally understood to indicate that this was not his problem. “I’m not pretending it makes sense,” he countered. “I’m only telling you what I saw. When we rolled him over he was covered in blood all right. It was smeared all over his face, his hair was stiff with it, and his clothes were completely soaked. But there were no wounds of any kind that I could see and no other signs of injury or trauma. Certainly nothing like what we were expecting to see given the condition of the apartment.�
��

  “What about under his clothes?” I asked, mentally scrambling to try and make what Blades was telling me fit in with what I imagined had taken place in Danny’s apartment. “Could the killer have removed Danny’s clothes and dressed him in something else to hide the wounds?”

  “Yeah,” replied Blades, “but why would he want to? Besides, if that had happened we’d have seen much less blood on his clothes. As it was they were so saturated you couldn’t even begin to guess the color of the fabric.”

  “Okay then,” I said, my frustration mounting. “You tell me. What happened to him?”

  “He bled to death.”

  “I’d say that was pretty obvious,” I snapped, losing patience. “What I want to know is how.”

  “The medical examiner is in charge of how. My job is to find out who.”

  “Come on, Joe,” urged Elliott. “You’ve looked at a lot of dead guys. You’re telling me you aren’t even willing to make a guess?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” replied Blades, shaking his head. “Vampires maybe? I’m serious, this is a strange one.”

  “Could his AIDS have had something to do with it, do you think?” I asked, unable to come up with anything else.

  “You’d have to ask a doctor, but I’ve got to tell you, there’s lots of ways that AIDS can kill you, but none of them is quick. I honestly wish I had something else to tell you, Kate. I’m not jerking your chain. But I’m afraid I came here to tell you that all we really can do now is wait for the autopsy results.”

  “But when will we get them?”

  “Right now the medical examiner’s office is being squeezed from every direction to identify Sarrek’s victims and homicide is stretched to the limit. I’ve been Pulled off regular duty and assigned to the task force investigating Sarrek. Everybody else is working double shifts trying to put together a case against this creep.”