I peered cautiously through the window and immediately felt ridiculous. The room was empty. Nothing sinister was afoot, just a light carelessly left on, nothing more. I stepped inside and looked along the wall for a switch. That’s when I saw it.
Draped on the back of a chair behind the computer console was a white lab coat. It wasn’t the lab coat that held my attention, but what was clipped to the front of it. Michelle had not only left the light on in her hurry, but had left her ID card behind as well.
Slowly, I crossed the room to look at the ID. The picture was the usual unrecognizable blur, and all but the first five letters of the name were obscured by the bulky rectangular radiation tag, but instinctively I knew there was something wrong. I read the letters out loud: M, I, C, H, A—Michael, not Michelle. With my heart beating faster I knelt down to be sure. I squinted at the picture. The ID belonged to Michael Childress, not Michelle Goodwin.
I rocked back onto my heels as the various pieces of the puzzle clicked noiselessly into place. Not some man who’d been having an affair with Danny, not someone intent on bringing down the company, but quiet, shy, fiercely obsessed Michelle. Michelle, the woman whose dreams of the future hinged on her solving the structure of ZKBP and getting the credit for it.
I never saw what hit me. Something heavy swung with terrific force. I don’t remember the moment of impact or the moment when I first realized I was hurt. The only sensations were the warmth of my own blood oozing through my hair, and watching the world spin around me. My reactions no doubt slowed by concussion, I fell to the ground and looked up just in time to see Michelle Goodwin getting ready to take another swing at me. In her hand was a metal instrument that looked like a small baseball bat. Borland had one just like it in the protein lab. It was a special heavy-duty pestle used to pound spleen tissue into a bloody pulp.
Instinctively I curled up into a ball to ward off the impact of the next blow and, without consciously deciding to do so, rolled under the desk. The pestle hit the edge of the desk with a terrific impact as I scrambled to my hands and knees, trapped like an animal. Michelle had all the advantages. Not only did she have a weapon, but she was in tremendous shape physically. Mentally, she had already shown herself capable of killing two men.
Terrified, I realized my best chance was to try to get away from her even if only out into the hallway, where there was some chance Paramilitary Bill would catch sight of me on the video monitors. I wondered if, in his effort to follow my instructions and make sure that no one left the building, he would even bother to look at them.
“Fight back,” I told myself. I had read somewhere that people who had survived deadly attacks all had one thing in common—they all reported that they’d made the decision, consciously and early in the attack, to fight back. They had been willing to trade injury, even grievous injury, in exchange for survival.
Above me Michelle was hissing and muttering, spewing forth a steady stream of profanities and demanding that I come out. I took a deep breath and propelled myself with all my strength against her legs, throwing her off balance so that she fell forward with her entire weight on top of me. After that I did everything I could think of. I clawed, I scratched, I bit into her leg so hard that I tasted her blood even as she kicked me in the face to be free of me.
The instant her weight was off of me I scrambled to my feet and headed for the door. My odds did not seem particularly promising. Not only was she a trained athlete, but she was dressed for the lab in tennis shoes, while I was hampered by a tight skirt and a pair of three-hundred-dollar Italian high heels.
I realized I would never make it to the elevator or even the stairs without her overtaking me. Instead I darted into the darkened animal lab and crouched, panting and terrified, behind a row of caged monkeys that had been selectively raised to have a predisposition to high blood pressure.
I looked around in the dark for the nearest phone and saw to my dismay that it was at the opposite end of the room. I thought about making a run for it but decided I needed to find some sort of weapon first. It was only a matter of time, possibly seconds, before Michelle Goodwin came through the door swinging her deadly pestle. I had chosen my spot badly. There was nothing within reach that could be used as a weapon except twenty-pound bags of dog chow that were piled in a corner and a case of paper towels.
I saw her in the doorway framed against the light of the hall. She wasn’t even breathing hard but was staring into the darkness with the calm intensity of a predator. Instinctively I wanted to talk to her, to try to reason with her. Then I thought about Childress’s lingers, bloodied from trying to claw his way out of his icy prison, and decided I would only be digging my own grave.
When she switched on the light, I was ready for her. Holding a bulky bag of dog food across my chest, I used it like a battering ram as I charged, knocking her off her feet and back out into the hall. I barreled into her, shoving her against the wall, and grabbed for her neck with all my strength.
I knew that while I must be screaming, I was probably also crying. All I remember was holding on to her neck with all my might while she landed blow after blow.
In the end it was Paramilitary Bill who saved her life. Two minutes more and I would have choked her dead. Oddly, it wasn’t the sight of us trying to kill each other on the video monitor, but the howling of the terrified animals from the animal labs that had drawn him from his post. Still, it took all his strength to pull us apart, and even then she did not stop. Indeed the worst blows came while he watched, almost as if she drew strength from having an audience. I’ll never forget the look on Bill’s face when he heard the sound my forearm made as it was shattered by the flailing pestle.
Everything that came later had the flavor of an anticlimax, though by the time the police came, I had at least managed to compose myself. Looking back, the strangest thing was that it never even occurred to me to call Stephen. Indeed, when he showed up later, no doubt tracked down by Paramilitary Bill, I was actually surprised to see him. We never even really talked. I was busy giving my statement to Detective Rankin when Stephen arrived.
Elliott had shown up much earlier, at almost the same time as the police. Once he’d received my message, he’d called back immediately. When I didn’t answer, he called the police and then got into his car and broke the speed record out to Oak Brook. He found me sitting in the hall—someone must have dragged a chair out of one of the labs—I don’t remember. I was holding a chemical cold pack to a bleeding gash in my face with my good arm while paramedics fitted the broken one with a splint.
Before I would let him drive me to the emergency room, I insisted we go back upstairs to my office so that I could put the draft of the agreement on Stephen’s desk where I could be sure he’d see it in the morning. I tried not to get too much blood on it. Then I paged Claudia to have her meet us in the emergency room. I insisted we drive to Hyde Park instead of going to some doc-in-the-box suburban hospital. On the way I explained to him about Michelle.
“You see, Michelle has only ever wanted one thing and that is to be famous in her field, which is X-ray crystallography. And I’ve got to hand it to whoever steered her into crystallography in the first place—they knew what they were doing. It was just perfect for someone like her. Obsessed, driven, single-minded, a highly intelligent loner. The problem is that success in crystallography is as much about luck as it is about science. A good crystallographer can go his or her entire career without solving the structure of a really important molecule. So far, Michelle had had her chance at solving three of them, and every time, circumstances kept her from her prize. Straight out of graduate school she’d worked in a lab that was destroyed by a fire set by a disgruntled employee, and two years’ work was lost. After that she went to work on one of a pair of enzymes related to the function of aspirin, and while she did get some attention for successfully solving the structure, it turns out the other enzyme is the one that mattered.
“Based on her success with that, Stephen hired her to
work on the company’s integrase project—that was an experimental AIDS drug they were working on—but they spent so much time trying to sell a deal to fund the project to a Japanese company called Okuda that another pharmaceutical company beat them to the structure.”
“Is that why she killed Danny? Because she didn’t want this deal you’re working on with the Japanese to go through?”
“Yes. You see, she didn’t care if Azor ever turned ZK-501 into a drug. She didn’t care if the company went bankrupt. Her interest has always been in purely academic research. All she wanted was to solve the structure of ZKBP so that she could return to academia wrapped in glory. She was afraid the company would get involved in another lengthy negotiation. She was desperate to prevent what had happened with Okuda from happening to her again.”
“Desperate enough to kill someone?”
“They all told me, every one of them, Borland, Remminger, even Stephen. I just wouldn’t listen.”
“What did they tell you?”
“In science no one cares how you get there, only that you get there first. Besides, killing Danny was so easy. He had come to her to ask about new AIDS drugs—she was the logical person to confide in. Not only did she have the expertise, but they were natural allies against Childress. All she had to do when he came home euphoric about the Japanese was to convince him to try some new treatment and inject him with PAF. I’m sure that when he started vomiting up blood it gave her a nasty surprise. It was obviously a struggle, but she had the strength and the presence of mind to keep him from getting help.
“I should have realized it was a woman from the way she managed to clean up the kitchen. I’m sure it never occurred to her that they’d look inside the drain for traces of blood. Other than that, she handled herself perfectly, even going so far as to steal the key to the guards’ room from the security desk at Azor and dispose of the videotape showing her coming into the building with the athletic bag containing the hypodermic, the syringe, and her bloody clothes.”
“Do you think they’re her fingerprints on the glass that was on the sink in Danny’s apartment?”
“Yes, I do. I think that was her one mistake, at least with Danny’s murder. She made a couple more with Childress.”
“Such as?”
“Such as mixing her ID card up with his. She had to have it in order to make it look like he’d left the building, but obviously, in her hurry to get rid of the evidence, she switched the two. The names are so similar, and both of them are all covered up with radiation tags, you can see how it would be easy to do.”
“I thought Borland said he checked the inside of the cold room before he taped it shut.”
“He did. But he had Michelle check it after him. All she had to do was ask Childress to come into the cold room with her to check something and then stab him with the hypodermic full of animal tranquilizer. I’m sure that when Dr. Gordon gets her final test results back, she’ll discover he was given enough to stun an elephant. Once Childress was out, all Michelle had to do was drag him off behind one of the piles of boxes. Nobody would see him unless they actually walked into the cold room, looking for something on one of the shelves.
“Then all she had to do was slip out of the building at some point and move his car. She didn’t have to take it to the airport then, only somewhere out of sight. With any luck maybe someone will remember seeing her. I guess what really bothers me most about all of this is how clever she was. When you think about it, there really isn’t that much evidence...” I said.
As we approached Hyde Park I realized the shock was finally wearing off and I was starting to hurt in all sorts of places.
“Don’t worry,” Elliott assured me as we pulled up to the emergency room entrance. “Now that the cops know where to look, they’ll get enough to bring a case against her. Joe’ll see to it. Besides, look at the bright side,” he said, as Claudia rushed through the double doors and pulled open the passenger door to shovel me into a waiting wheelchair. “There’s no way she’ll be able to beat the rap for assault.”
CHAPTER 29
Elliott stayed with me while I waited to be X-rayed, and watched as Claudia stitched me up. He fetched me water and held my head so that I could sip it through a straw. As Claudia sewed, Elliott told her the story of what had happened, which she listened to without comment, frowning intently over her work. The only really bad part was when they set my arm. It hurt so much that I screamed, but in the end I got to choose the color of the cast which was some small consolation. I picked black because it goes with everything—I am my mother’s daughter, after all.
The sun was starting to come up on another day when Elliott finally took me home. By then I was so full of pain medication and limp with fatigue that simple things, like the stairs and finding my keys in the bottom of my purse, seemed impossibly hard and beyond my grasp.
In the end I allowed myself to be undressed like a child. Elliott winced at the sight of the bruises on my shoulders and back and proclaimed himself amazed that I hadn’t broken any ribs. While he went off in search of ice packs, I slid gratefully between the sheets.
“You should go to bed,” he said, helping me pull the few remaining hairpins from what remained of my French twist.
“I am in bed,” I replied groggily.
“I meant with me,” he said, kissing me chastely on the forehead.
“That’s very smooth,” I replied dreamily. “Do you always proposition women who’ve been beaten up? I’m sure you get lots of girls that way.”
“I don’t want lots of girls. I want you.”
“All I want right now is to go to sleep,” I murmured.
“I don’t mean right now.”
“I don’t know how I feel about that,” I said finally.
“Perhaps you won’t know until you try,” he replied, kissing me one last time before standing up to go. “I think sometimes you just have to do the experiment.”
If you liked Fatal Reaction, don’t miss the other Kate Millholland novels:
PRINCIPAL
DEFENSE
Kate Millholland may be an heiress, but she works hard for her money as a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer in Chicago’s most aggressive firm. When Azor, the high-tech, high-profit pharmaceutical company founded by her sometime lover, Stephen Azorini, faces a takeover, Kate will do anything to stop it from happening.
But the stakes rise even higher when Stephen’s teenage niece, Gretchen, is killed. Everyone knows that if Gretchen’s shares go to the corporate raider, Stephen will lose everything—so Kate plunges into an investigation of murder.
by GINI HARTZMARK
Published by Ivy Books.
Available at your local bookstore.
FINAL OPTION
When lawyer Kate Millholland arrives at the home of Bart Hexter, one of Chicago’s most powerful players in the futures market, she finds him behind the wheel of his Rolls-Royce, clad only in a pair of red silk pajamas, with two bullets in his head.
Topping the list of suspects—including his wife, his mistress, his personal assistant, and his children—is Kate, whose scheduled meeting with the dead man makes her the prime candidate for murder.
by GINI HARTZMARK
Published by Ivy Books.
Available at your local bookstore.
BITTER BUSINESS
At the request of a colleague, Chicago attorney Kate Millholland agrees to represent the Cavanaugh family’s company, Superior Plating & Specialty Chemicals—and discovers that the family is as corrosive as the chemicals it produces.
She never expects to uncover the sordid, fatal secrets that bind the Cavanaughs together—the least of which is murder.
by GINI HARTZMARK
Published by Ivy Books.
Available at your local bookstore.
GINI HARTZMARK attended the law and business schools of the University of Chicago and was a business and economics writer. She has written articles on a variety of topics for the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago T
ribune, and a number of national magazines. She is the author of the Kate Millholland novels: Principal Defense, Final Option, and Bitter Business.
Ms. Hartzmark and her husband live in Arizona with their three children.
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
Fatal Reaction Page 29