Robin Cook

by Mortal Fear

  Like Hayes’s apartment, the lab was a mess. All the drawers and cabinets had been emptied onto the floor, but the high-tech equipment appeared untouched, so it was obvious to both of them that it had been a search and not a destructive visit. Jason glanced into Hayes’s office. It was equally littered, with the contents of the desk and several file cabinets strewn about the floor.

  Helene Brennquivist appeared in the doorway to the animal room, her face white and drawn. Her hair was again severely pulled back from her face, but without her usual shapeless lab coat, Jason could see she had an attractive figure.

  “Can you tell if anything is missing?” Shirley asked.

  “Well, I don’t see my data books,” Helene said. “And some of the E. coli bacterial cultures are gone. But the worst is what’s happened to the animals.”

  “What about them?” Jason asked, noting that her usually emotionless face was trembling with fear.

  “Maybe you should look. They’ve all been killed!”

  Jason stepped around Helene and through the steel door into the animal area. He was immediately confronted with a pungent, zoolike stench. He turned on the light. It was a larger room, some fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. The animal cages were organized in rows and stacked one on top of the other, sometimes as many as six high.

  Jason started down the nearest row, glancing into individual cages. Behind him the door closed with a decisive click. Helene had not been exaggerating: all the animals that Jason saw were dead, hideously curled in contorted positions, often with bloodied tongues as if they’d chewed them in their final agony.

  Suddenly Jason stopped short. Staring into a group of large cages, he saw something that made his stomach turn: rats the likes of which he had never seen. They were huge, almost the size of pigs, and their bald, whiplike tails were as thick as Jason’s wrists. Their exposed teeth were four inches long. Moving along, Jason came to rabbits the same size, and then white mice the size of small dogs.

  This side of genetic engineering horrified Jason. Although he was afraid of what he might see, morbid curiosity drove him on. Slowly, he looked into other cages, seeing distortions of familiar creatures that made him sick. It was science gone mad: rabbits with several heads and mice with supernumerary extremities and extra sets of eyes. For Jason, genetic manipulation of primitive bacteria was one thing; distortion of mammals was quite another.

  He retreated back to the central part of the lab, where Shirley and Helene had been checking the scintillation cultures.

  “Have you seen the animals?” Jason asked Shirley with disgust.

  “Unfortunately. When Curran was here. Don’t remind me.”

  “Did the GHP authorize those experiments?” Jason demanded.

  “No,” Shirley said. “We never questioned Hayes. We never thought we had to.”

  “The power of celebrity,” Jason said cynically.

  “The animals were part of Dr. Hayes’s growth hormone work,” Helene said defensively.

  “Whatever,” Jason said. He was not interested in any ethical argument with Helene at the moment. “At any rate, they’re all dead.”

  “All of them?” Shirley questioned. “How bizarre. What do you think happened?”

  “Poison,” Jason said grimly. “Though why anyone searching for drugs would bother to kill lab animals beats me.”

  “Do you have any explanation for all of this?” Shirley said angrily, turning to Helene.

  The younger woman shook her head, her eyes darting nervously about the room.

  Shirley continued to stare at Helene, who was now shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. Jason watched, intrigued by Shirley’s suddenly aggressive behavior.

  “You’d better cooperate,” she was saying, “or you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. Dr. Howard is convinced you’re keeping something from us. If that’s true and we find out, I hope you realize what that can do to your career.”

  Helene’s anxiety was finally apparent. “I just followed Dr. Hayes’s orders,” she said, her voice breaking.

  “What orders?” Shirley asked, lowering her voice threateningly.

  “We did some free-lance work here …”

  “What kind?”

  “Dr. Hayes moonlighted for a company called Gene, Inc. We developed a recombinant strain of E. coli to produce a hormone for them.”

  “Were you aware that moonlighting was specifically forbidden under Dr. Hayes’s contract?”

  “That’s what he told me,” Helene admitted.

  Shirley glared at Helene for another minute. Finally she said, “I don’t want you to speak of this to anyone. I want you to make a detailed list of every animal and item missing or damaged in this lab and bring it directly to me. Do you understand?”

  Helene nodded.

  Jason followed Shirley out of the lab. She had obviously succeeded where he had failed, in breaking through Helene’s facade. But she hadn’t asked the right questions.

  “Why didn’t you press her about Hayes’s breakthrough?” he said as they arrived at the elevator. Shirley hit the down button repeatedly, obviously furious.

  “I didn’t think of it. Every time I think the Hayes problem is under control, something new comes up. I had specifically demanded the no-moonlighting clause in his contract.”

  “It doesn’t much matter now,” Jason said, boarding the elevator after Shirley. “The man is dead.”

  She sighed. “You’re right. Maybe I’m overreacting. I just wish this whole affair was over.”

  “I still think Helene knows more than she’s telling.”

  “I’ll talk to her again.”

  “And after seeing those animals, you don’t think you should call the police?”

  “With the police come the newspapers,” Shirley reminded him. “With the newspapers comes trouble. Aside from the animals, it doesn’t appear that anything terribly valuable is damaged.”

  Jason held his tongue. Obviously, reporting the break-in was an administrative decision. He was more concerned about discovering Hayes’s breakthrough, and he knew the police and newspapers wouldn’t help in finding that. He wondered if the breakthrough could have involved the monstrous animals. The thought gave him a shiver.

  Jason started rounds with Matthew Cowen. Unfortunately, there’d been a new development. Besides his other problems, Matthew was now acting bizarrely. Only a few minutes earlier the nurses had found him wandering in the halls, mumbling nonsense to himself. When Jason entered the room he was restrained in the bed, regarding Jason as a stranger. The man was acutely disoriented as to time, place, and person. As far as Jason was concerned, that could have meant only one thing. The man had thrown emboli, probably blood clots, from his injured heart valves into his brain. In other words he’d had a stroke or perhaps even multiple strokes.

  Without delay, Jason placed a call for a neurology consult. He also called the cardiac surgeon who’d seen the case. Although he debated immediate anticoagulation, he decided to wait for the neurologist’s opinion. In the interim, he started the patient on aspirin and Persantine to reduce platelet adhesiveness. Strokes were a disturbing development and a very bad sign.

  Jason did the rest of his rounds quickly and was about to leave for home and for some much-needed sleep when he was paged by the emergency room for one of his patients. Cursing under his breath, he ran downstairs, hoping whatever the problem was, it could be easily solved. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case.

  Arriving breathless in the main treatment room, he found a group of residents giving CPR to a comatose patient. A quick look at the monitor screen told him there was no cardiac activity at all.

  Jason stepped over to Judith Reinhart, who told him the patient had been found unconscious by her husband when he tried to waken her in the morning.

  “Did the EMTs see any cardiac or respiratory activity?”

  “None,” Judith said. “In fact, she feels cold to me.”

  Jason touched the woman’s leg and agreed. Her face
was turned away from him.

  “What’s the patient’s name?” Jason asked, intuitively bracing himself for the blow.

  “Holly Jennings.”

  Jason felt like he’d been hit in the stomach. “My God!” he murmured.

  “Are you all right?” Judith asked.

  Jason nodded, but he insisted that the ER team maintain the CPR long past any reasonable time. He’d suspected trouble when he’d seen Holly on Thursday, but not this. He just couldn’t accept the fact that, like Cedric Harring, Holly would die less than a month after her fancy GHP physical told her she was okay, and two days after he’d seen her again.

  Shaken, Jason picked up the phone and called Margaret Danforth.

  “So once again there’s no cardiac history?” Margaret asked him.

  “That’s correct.”

  “What are you people doing down there?” Margaret demanded.

  Jason didn’t answer. He wanted Margaret to release the case so they could do the autopsy at GHP, but Margaret hesitated.

  “We’ll do the case today,” Jason said. “You’ll have a report early next week.”

  “I’m sorry,” Margaret said, making a decision.

  “There are questions in my mind, and I think I’m obligated by law to do the autopsy.”

  “I understand. But I suppose you wouldn’t mind supplying us with specimens so we can process them here as well.”

  “I suppose,” Margaret said without enthusiasm. “To tell the truth, I don’t even know the legality. But I’ll find out. I’d rather not wait two weeks for the microscopic.”

  Jason went home and fell into bed. He slept for four hours, interrupted by a call from the neurologist concerning Matthew. He wanted to anti-coagulate and CAT-scan the patient. Jason implored him to do whatever he thought was best.

  Jason tried to go back to sleep, but he couldn’t. He felt shell-shocked and anxious. He got up. It was a gloomy, late fall day with a slight drizzle that made Boston look dreadful. Fighting a depression, he paced his apartment, searching for something to occupy his mind. Realizing he couldn’t stay there, he put on casual clothes and went down to his car. Knowing he was probably asking for trouble, he drove over to Beacon Street and parked in front of Carol’s apartment.

  Ten minutes later, as if God had finally decided to give him a break, Carol emerged. Dressed in jeans and a turtleneck, with her thick brown hair gathered in a ponytail, she seemed the young college student the Club Cabaret advertised. Feeling the light drizzle, she opened a flower print umbrella and started up the street, passing within a few feet of Jason, who scrunched down in his car seat, unreasonably afraid she’d recognize him.

  Giving her a good lead, Jason got out of his car to follow on foot. He lost sight of her on Dartmouth Street, but picked her up at Commonwealth Avenue. As he continued to follow her, he kept a sharp eye out for the likes of Bruno or Curran. At the comer of Dartmouth and Boylston, Jason stopped at a magazine stand and thumbed through a periodical. Carol passed him, waited for the light, then hurried across Boylston. Jason studied the people and the cars, looking for anything suspicious. But there was no indication that Carol was not alone.

  She was now passing the Boston Public Library, and Jason guessed she was heading for the Copley Plaza Shopping Mall. After buying the magazine, which turned out to be The New Yorker, Jason continued after her. When she folded her umbrella and went into the Copley Plaza, Jason quickened his step. It was a large shopping and hotel complex, and he knew he could easily lose her.

  For the next three-quarters of an hour, Jason busied himself by pretending to study window displays, reading his New Yorker, and eyeing the crowds. Carol happily hopped from Louis Vuitton to Ralph Lauren to Victoria’s Secret. At one point Jason thought she was being tailed, but it turned out the man in question was simply trying to pick her up. She apparently rebuffed his advance when he finally approached her, because he quickly disappeared.

  At a little after three-thirty, Carol took her bags and umbrella and retreated into Au Bon Pain. Jason followed, standing next to her as they waited to order and taking the opportunity to note her lovely oval face, smooth olive complexion, and dark liquid eyes. She was a handsome young woman. Jason guessed she was about twenty-four.

  “Good day for coffee,” he said, hoping to start a conversation.

  “I prefer tea.”

  Jason smiled sheepishly. He wasn’t good at pickups or small talk. “Tea’s good, too,” he said, afraid he was making a fool of himself.

  Carol ordered soup, tea, and a plain croissant, then carried her tray to one of the large communal tables.

  Jason ordered a cappuccino and then, hesitating as though he could find no place to sit, approached her table.

  “Do you mind?” he asked, pulling back a chair.

  Several of the people at the table looked up, including Carol. A man moved several of his packages. Jason sat down, giving everyone a limp smile.

  “What a coincidence,” Jason said to Carol. “We meet again.”

  Carol eyed him over her teacup. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to. Her expression reflected her irritation.

  At once Jason recognized that his whole act appeared to be a come-on and that he was about to be sent packing. “Excuse me,” he said. “I don’t mean to be a bother. My name is Dr. Jason Howard. I was a colleague of Dr. Alvin Hayes. You’re Carol Donner, and I’d like very much to talk with you.”

  “You’re with GHP?” Carol asked suspiciously.

  “I’m the current chief of the medical staff.” It was the first time Jason had ever used the title. At a regular academic hospital it had great significance, but at GHP the job was a bothersome sinecure.

  “How can I be sure?” Carol asked.

  “I can show you my license.”

  “Okay.”

  Jason reached behind for his wallet, but Carol grasped his arm.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I believe you. Alvin used to speak of you. Said you were the best clinician there.”

  “I’m flattered,” Jason said. He was also surprised, considering the little contact he’d had with Hayes.

  “Sorry to be so suspicious,” Carol said, “but I get hassled a lot, especially the last few days. What would you like to talk about?”

  “Dr. Hayes,” Jason said. “First, I’d like to say that his death was a real loss to us. You have my sympathy.”

  Carol shrugged.

  Jason wasn’t sure what to make of her response. “I still have trouble believing Dr. Hayes was involved with drugs. Did you know about that?” he asked.

  “I did. But the newspapers had it wrong. Alvin was a minimal user, usually marijuana but occasionally cocaine. Certainly not heroin.”

  “Not a dealer?”

  “Absolutely not. Believe me, I would have known.”

  “But a lot of drugs and cash were found in his apartment.”

  “The only explanation I can think of is that the police put both the drugs and the money in the apartment. Alvin was always short of both. If he ever had extra cash, he sent it to his family.”

  “You mean his ex-wife?”

  “Yes. She had custody of his children.”

  “Why would the police do such a thing?” Jason asked, thinking her comment echoed Hayes’s paranoia.

  “I don’t know, really. But I can’t think of any other way the drugs could have gotten there. I can assure you, he didn’t have them when I left at nine o’clock that evening.”

  Jason leaned forward, lowering his voice. “The night Dr. Hayes died he told me he’d made a major discovery. Did he tell you anything about it?”

  “He mentioned something. But that was three months ago.”

  For a moment Jason allowed himself to feel optimistic. Then Carol explained that she didn’t know what the discovery was.

  “He didn’t confide in you?”

  “Not lately. We’d kinda drifted apart.”

  “But you were living together—or did the newspapers ge
t that wrong too?”

  “We were living together,” Carol admitted, “but in the end just as roommates. Our relationship had deteriorated. He really changed. It wasn’t just that he felt physically ill; his whole personality was different. He seemed withdrawn, almost paranoid. He kept talking about seeing you and I tried to get him to do it.”

  “You really have no idea what the discovery was?” Jason persisted.

  “Sorry,” Carol said, spreading her hands in apology. “The only thing I remember was that he said the breakthrough was ironic. I remembered because it seemed an odd way to describe success.”

  “He said the same to me.”

  “At least he was consistent. His only other comment was that if all went well, I would appreciate it because I was beautiful. Those were his exact words.”

  “He didn’t elaborate?”

  “That was all he said.”

  Taking a sip of his cappuccino, Jason stared at Carol’s face. How could an ironic discovery help her beauty? His mind tried to reconcile that statement with his guess that Hayes’s discovery had something to do with a cancer cure. It didn’t fit.

  Finishing her tea, Carol stood up. “I’m glad to have met you,” she said, thrusting out her hand.

  Jason stood up, awkwardly catching his chair to keep it from falling over. He was nonplussed by her sudden departure.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, “but I have an appointment. I hope you solve the mystery. Alvin worked very hard. It would be a tragedy if he’d discovered something important and it was lost.”

  “My feelings exactly,” said Jason, frantic not to see her disappear. “Can we meet again? There’s so much more I’d like to discuss.”

  “I suppose. But I’m quite busy. When did you have in mind?”

  “How about tomorrow?” Jason suggested eagerly. “Sunday brunch.”

  “It would have to be late. I work at night and Saturday is the busiest.”

  Jason could well imagine. “Please,” he said. “It could be important.”

  “All right. Let’s say two P.M. Where?”

  “How about the Hampshire House?”