Finally Jacques was standing over me, smiling. He whipped the tape off my mouth and I spat out the pill. It rolled onto the floor behind Jacques and he turned and stooped to pick it up. He walked close to me, holding the pill up to the light, and then he reached over, cupped my jaw in his hand, and stuffed the pill down my throat.
I sat up in bed so suddenly that I almost got whiplash. I felt my face for the tape but it wasn’t there. It had been so real! Now I clung to my present reality, incredibly thankful that it had been a dream. But I lay trembling in bed as I remembered what I’d read on Osborn’s files and realized I had a right to be afraid. I desperately needed to talk to Jacques or Martha.
I went in search of them. As luck would have it, I found them both in the cafeteria, sitting across from each other at a table. I wondered if they, too, had been talking about me.
“Who’s the dog handler?” I asked bluntly. Everyone else had long gone, the dog was just a memory, and we were alone.
“What do you mean?” asked Jacques.
“You knew her. I saw the look on your face when you first saw her.”
“Just an old friend,” he said.
“Then why didn’t you go up and say hello?”
“Cordi, don’t be so rude,” said Martha.
I was feeling quite paranoid, but for all I knew Minnie was an old police dog that Jacques had worked with and that was why he’d had a weird expression on his face. Then again, I’d never met a golden retriever that would make a good police dog. At first glimpse of a criminal Minnie would attack with tail wagging and tongue-slurping kisses. In answer to my question, Jacques just shrugged.
But I forgot about Minnie in my haste to tell them about Osborn. “It looks like he’s our man,” I said, relishing what was to come. They both looked over at me.
“How so?” said Jacques.
“He and his partner, David Ellison, were experimenting with rats using a new drug called Ecteril. It was supposed to help in memory loss for Alzheimer’s patients.”
I had their undivided attention. “At first the results were terrific and they published a paper saying as much.”
“But something went wrong,” said Jacques.
“Yes. Some of the rats began to die from strokes.”
“How do you know this?” asked Jacques. Martha told him about my accessing Osborn’s computer. Jacques looked stunned at our audacity.
“His trial records were all there on his desktop,” I said.
“So rats were dying,” said Jacques, recovering.
“And?” asked Martha.
“He had applied to start a clinical trial with human subjects on the basis of the results of the rat study,” I said.
“Let me guess,” said Jacques. “He was denied.”
“That’s right. They said no, the drug was too dangerous, end of story. Except I don’t think it was the end of the story.”
“Okay,” said Jacques. “Shoot.”
“I think they tried Ecteril on Ellison’s old and dying Alzheimer’s patients.”
“What makes you think that?” asked Martha.
“There was a file on his desk a few days ago that I downloaded from his computer. A Minnie Anderson.” I was watching Jacques closely. “She was an Alzheimer’s patient under his partner’s care.”
“So what did you learn from it?” asked Martha.
“She was receiving a cocktail of drugs for various ailments: Aricept, Lipitor, Naprosyn, Ecteril, oxybutynin, and clonazepam.”
I waited. Jacques was being infuriatingly silent. I knew he had spotted it, but it was Martha, who said, “Ecteril?”
“Exactly. Right, Jacques?” I said.
He looked at me and I could see sweat on his brow, but confusion in his eyes.
“You really are an undercover cop, aren’t you, just as we said?” I asked.
He was silent, as if searching for something to say.
“What makes you think I’m a cop?” he finally said.
“I saw how you looked at Minnie’s handler,” I said impatiently.
“Minnie?” he asked. Man, he was good.
“The dog,” I said.
“Right. The dog.” When I said nothing he finally asked, “What about the dog?”
“She must belong to the daughter or relative or friend of your client, doesn’t she?” I was winging it, hoping to catch him off guard.
“Come again?” Jacques cocked his head.
“Your client is Minnie Anderson’s daughter, or at least some close relative,” I said. “She’s the dog handler, and she hired you to find out about her mother, Minnie. She obviously named the dog after her mother.”
Jacques looked at me strangely.
“What made you go undercover?” I asked.
“Because there’d been a rash of unexplained deaths?” he said, almost as though he was just trying to please me. Very unnerving.
“And what does the dog have to do with all this?” he asked.
“Nothing, but you were hired to look into why Minnie died.”
“Minnie died?” asked Martha, looking confused.
“Minnie had a stroke, a known side effect of Ecteril, according to Osborn’s records,” I said.
“And you think Osborn gave the drug to Minnie after his trials were aborted?” said Martha.
“Yes.”
“But what does all this have to do with Mavis?” asked Jacques.
My theory was coming together just fine.
“I remember Mavis telling me about two little birds on a telephone wire when I first came here,” I said.
“So?” asked Martha.
“She had completely forgotten the joke when I finally came back to the land of the living.”
“So?” asked Martha again.
“So, suppose she had an ECT and was one of the unlucky ones to lose her memory,” I said.
“Why is that important?” asked Martha.
“What if Osborn wasn’t just working with Alzheimer’s patients. What if he was looking into seeing if it would work on ECT patients, too?” I suggested.
“Would a drug designed for Alzheimer’s patients work for ECT patients?” asked Jacques.
I was on a roll and wasn’t really listening to him. I continued, “Osborn would need to choose a patient whose memory had been wiped by ECT. He’d then give her Ecteril and test her memory again after she had her next ECT. If her memory is good, then he’d know the Ecteril works.”
“Slow down, Cordi,” said Martha. “You’re speaking too fast.”
“After the last of Mavis’s ECT treatments,” I said, enunciating every syllable, “and just before she died, she remembered her stained T-shirt. The Ecteril worked! She didn’t lose her memory that last time.”
Bradley’s quote from Hemingway rang through my head: “It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient.”
“And Mavis,” said Jacques, “was his guinea pig.”
“Yes, but I think you already knew that,” I said. “You were way too interested in my ECT when I told you I’d had one. You weren’t interested in me. You were interested in what I knew or what I might find out. You even had lock picks and it was you who suggested there was a cover-up. You went so far as to almost get an ECT yourself so you could get some Ecteril and flush Osborn out, but you chickened out. Rightly so, it would seem. But you used me to track down Mavis’s and Minnie’s killer.”
Jacques let out a whistle.
“And Osborn is after me now. I’m his next guinea pig.”
And then an awful thought occurred to me. Maybe he had already given me Ecteril. Maybe he had given me more than one ECT and I had just assumed when he said ‘another’ that it meant a second one. I’d remembered Mavis’s joke hadn’t I? Or did she tell that to me before the first ECT and for some reason I had remembered t
he joke and little else? My mind was whirling with possibilities, but I wasn’t dead so I hadn’t taken the Ecteril. And if I had, I’d survived hadn’t I?
Chapter Twenty-Five
I left Martha and Jacques and went back to get my computer to look through Osborn’s files again, specifically Mavis’s. What I found there gave me the ammunition to go and see Osborn and have it out with him. I’d have to wait for morning, though, because the nurse told me he’d gone for the day. I was just packing up my computer to take it back to the nursing station when Ella walked in.
“Just wanted to know how you’re doing,” she said.
“Fine,” I said.
“You don’t have anything you want to talk about?”
I wondered what she was getting at. “Come to think of it,” I said, “I am curious as to why you stopped trying to kill me.”
She blinked, but showed no other signs of guilt.
“I saw you in Dr. Osborn’s office,” I told her. “You were crying.”
Her face remained impassive.
“He broke up with you, didn’t he? Osborn broke up with you and that’s why you stopped trying to kill me. You didn’t have to protect him anymore.” Ella pulled on her ear, as if it were a lifeline.
“You knew about the Ecteril. You knew about Minnie. I saw how you reacted when you learned the dog’s name.”
She just stood there, quietly watching me.
“Or maybe it really is you, and not Osborn, who killed Mavis. She saw you stealing drugs from the medication room.” I didn’t really believe what I was saying but I wanted to see her reaction.
“Cordi, you know the medication room is just a distribution centre,” said Ella “Only the drugs to be used on that day are there and they’re individually wrapped for each patient. There is nothing to steal.”
“Not even Ecteril?”
She didn’t miss a beat.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Cordi. You need to try and rest your mind, clear everything out of it, and let the medication work.”
She spent another fifteen minutes or so with me, trying to get me to talk about how I was feeling. But I was afraid I was going to bite her head off, so I said nothing until she made a move to leave.
“I need to talk to Dr. Osborn, please.”
And finally her face registered something. But relief was not what I expected.
We’d arranged for me to see Osborn the next morning at 11:00 and I spent the hours before obsessing about what I would say to him. I tried to marshal all my thoughts and arguments and accusations, worried that I would not be able to get it all together when I confronted Osborn. The thoughts were coming so fast and furious that I could see the faces of each of the people who might have killed Mavis, all of their motives, all of the minutiae of their lives, all like one vast wild chaotic kaleidoscope whirling out of control. But it all came down to Osborn. Of that I was sure.
I made a conscious effort to slow my mind and was trying to meditate when Ella came and got me. She let me through the door from the cafeteria without saying a word and I made my way down the hall to Osborn’s door. I knocked and heard him call out to come in. I opened the door, and as I walked in he got up from his desk and walked around to greet me, his face haggard-looking, as if he knew what was coming.
“I know you killed Mavis,” I said.
He motioned me to sit down. I sat in my usual spot and he sat across from me, as if I hadn’t said anything. He pursed his lips and said, “Cordi, think it through. Why would I kill Mavis?”
“She killed your first wife?” I didn’t really believe that, but I wanted to catch him off guard. And I did.
He looked absolutely flabbergasted. I went in for the kill.
“It was for the money then, wasn’t it? You stood to make a fortune as the man who found the drug that would cure memory loss, not only in Alzheimer’s patients but in ECT patients, too.”
“It would be very exciting to discover such a drug.”
“But you almost did. Ecteril.”
He looked surprised.
“I read your and Ellison’s study with rats and Ecteril.”
“Then you must know some rats died and we pulled the plug on any future research. We weren’t sure why or how it worked when it did, but it was too dangerous to pursue.”
“Except you did pursue it. You couldn’t resist the lure of fame and fortune and you tried it out on Minnie Anderson first, and you killed her.”
“Minnie Anderson was old and died of natural causes.”
“You cherry-picked your patients. You moved on from Alzheimer’s patients to ECT patients. You earmarked those who’d had an ECT and suffered from memory loss, like Mavis. And then you gave them Ecteril to see if it worked to stop their short-term memory loss on the next ECT.”
Osborn stared at me. It was disconcerting, but I continued,“That’s why you were so interested to learn that Mavis had actually remembered spilling the juice on her shirt, a very short-term memory indeed. You knew it had worked.” I paused for effect.
“You gave Mavis Ecteril and she died of a stroke because of it. How many others have died that we don’t know about? How many more Alzheimer’s patients did you kill before you moved on to us? And was I next on your list? Is that why you were so persistent about getting me to think about having another ECT? You knew I’d lost my memory. That made me the perfect candidate for Ecteril. Or have you already given me Ecteril?”
Osborn leaned forward in his chair and our eyes locked. “Listen, Cordi, do you remember my telling you about having the wrong premise, but everything you do based on that premise makes sense? Your delusions are based on the wrong premise — that Mavis died.”
It sounded like a non sequitur to me. And besides, Mavis did die. I just couldn’t seem to get this through to him.
He was about to say something else when the phone rang. It always seemed to be ringing and interrupting us, I thought angrily.
While he was on the phone and my thoughts were in turmoil, I looked around for something to calm myself. He had a bunch of magazines on the coffee table, but there was also a plastic stand-up picture frame with some words on it that either hadn’t been there before or that I hadn’t noticed. I reached over and picked it up.
My desolate mind cannot erase
The darkness within … it’s God’s disgrace
So the poem had spoken to Dr. Osborn, too.
“Chilling in its accuracy, isn’t it?” said Osborn, hanging up the phone.
“‘God’s disgrace’ — it’s very haunting,” I agreed.
“My son wrote it,” said Osborn with more than a touch of parental pride.
And suddenly everything came together for me.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“So Bradley’s your son?” I couldn’t resist looking at his family portrait, at a young Bradley. That was who Bradley had reminded me of earlier — of his younger self, the boy still evident in the man.
Osburn looked at me thoughtfully, before replying, “That’s confidential, if you don’t mind. He doesn’t want people to think he’s getting preferential treatment.”
But I’d seen them together at the hockey game. Anyone else could have, too, and think he was getting preferential treatment.
“And is he?” I said.
Osborn pursed his lips, but said nothing.
“Was he why you were pushing your experiments with Ecteril? To help your son?”
I paused, then went on, “He was terrified of ECT, afraid he’d lose his memory like Hemingway, but what if everything else had failed? That all that was left to try was ECT? What wouldn’t a parent do to ease the fear?”
“Listen to yourself, Cordi. It’s all in your head. The research was discontinued because it was too dangerous.”
“But your son kept pushing you, didn’t he? That’s who you we
re talking to on the phone when you said, ‘It’s been stopped. It’s out of my hands.’”
He stared at me from across his desk.
“But it wasn’t out of your son’s hands, was it? And you knew the minute I told you that Mavis remembered the juice being spilled on her T-shirt.”
It was all coming clear to me, like fog consumed by the sun, leaving nothing but clarity.
“And Bradley was desperate. Suppose he stole some Ecteril from you and tried it out on Mavis first, just to make sure it was okay, in his deluded reasoning.”
I saw Osborn start at that and I knew I’d hit a nerve.
I was suddenly anxious to get out of there, afraid Osborn would put me in a straitjacket and ship me off somewhere to silence me. I ran from his office, then down the hall and through the door to the cafeteria and into the common room. I literally bumped into Austin as he came through the door from the lobby.
We untangled ourselves and I looked him in the eye and said, “Was Bradley going to give you a pill that would stop the memory loss of ECT?’
Austin gave me an odd look and started to move away from me.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. But I knew he did.
“Don’t take it,” I called after him. “It’ll kill you.”
Ella came up to me then and I turned to her and said, “But you’re not trying to kill me anymore, are you? I know why now. It wasn’t Osborn, it was his son. You stopped when you found out that Dr. Osborn’s son had killed Mavis by using her as a guinea pig — giving her Ecteril — before taking it himself. Or maybe he didn’t even know about Minnie’s death and gave the pill to Mavis because, like him, she was so desperately afraid of losing her memory.”
Ella reached out her hand as if to take me by the shoulder, but I backed away.
“It wasn’t Dr. Osborn,” I continued. “You must have been very relieved. But didn’t it bother you that there had been others? I overheard you saying that, that there had been others.”
Crazy Dead (A Cordi O'Callaghan Mystery) Page 20