A Perilous Conception

by Larry Karp

  “I’ve seen his picture in the paper, front and center with Bancroft and their wives at every society shindig in town. He ran in on the scene right after I got there. Puffed-up, patronizing windbag.”

  Mel made a face, nodded. “Camnitz told Bancroft there was talk that the doctor who got killed might’ve been doing some very controversial work on human embryos under the table. He said if that gets out, it could be a major black eye for the department and the school.”

  “More major than a murder-suicide?”

  He leaned across the desk toward me. “Bernie—”

  “What? Are you saying you want me to go sit down and write this up as a nuthead who forgot his meds and went over the edge?”

  The pencil snapped in Mel’s hand. He looked at it like it had broken of its own will, to embarrass him. “No, Bernie. That’s not what I’m telling you. I’d never order you to cover over a case you thought needed looking at. What I am going to do is take Olson off, and give it to you as a special assignment. Get what you need from the crime-scene crews, then you’re on your own. I don’t want to take any chance that someone in the department might talk out of school. And stay away from the press. Take a week or so, then let’s talk about it again. But in the meanwhile, I don’t want Horseshit Horace dragging the mayor into my office again. Fair enough?”

  I got to my feet. Christ, I was tired. I gave Mel a good fish eye. “What could be fairer?”

  He smiled. “Thanks, Bernie. I knew I could count on you.”

  ***

  “Bernie?”

  Irma, my wife. I took a deep breath. “What?”

  She slammed down the book she was reading. “Bernie, what the hell am I going to do with you? I keep thinking, maybe as you get older, you’ll mellow out a little, but you just get worse and worse. You didn’t come home till after nine o’clock. Dinner was like shoe leather.”

  “I’m sorry, Irma, I’m a cop. I don’t punch a time clock when I’m on a murder-suicide. After I was through at the scene, I had to go talk to the suicide’s wife and the wife’s doctor, then drive out in the boonies to tell the victim’s mother her daughter had been shot to death.”

  “No, that’s wrong. You didn’t have to do any of it. You’ve been eligible for retirement for almost a year. You could be taking things easy, enjoying life. Reading books. Working in the garden. You could be home for dinner on time every night. We could go on a cruise, let people wait on us hand and foot. That actually might be nice.”

  “Irma, how many times do we need to go through this? Can you just about see me on a cruise, pacing the deck of a ship like a caged animal, except for when I’m doubled over the rail, turning my stomach inside out? And I did call to tell you I’d be late, didn’t I?”

  “You want a medal for that? To go along with your thirty-year ribbon? God damn it, Bernie, all you think about and all you care about is cops and robbers. You come in three hours late, then you don’t say Word One all through dinner, and for an hour now, you’ve been stretched out in that goddamn recliner, staring at the ceiling like you’re trying to burn holes in it with your eyes. It’s only your body that’s here, and as for me, I might as well not have a body, for all the interest you show in it any more.” She grabbed her book, jumped up out of her chair, and let the book fly. I dodged left; it whizzed past my ear, hit the headrest, bounced to the floor. “I’m going up to bed,” she shouted. “You’re probably going to fall asleep right where you’re sitting, anyway.”

  A minute later, I heard the door slam upstairs. The whole living room shook.

  Irma’s Hungarian, and she’s got that real Hungarian temper. The least little thing sets her foaming at the mouth. Her mother was like that, too. In twenty-four years of marriage, Irma and I must have set some kind of record for good, loud fights, but right then, I was glad she settled for taking herself off to bed. I didn’t feel like cranking it up. I was tired, I was disgusted, and I was thinking. This case didn’t smell right.

  Chapter Six

  Baumgartner

  Next thing I knew, the sun was in my face. I shook my head awake, then checked my watch. Five minutes to eight. As I threw the recliner handle forward and the chair snapped upright, my back registered a serious protest. Damn, getting too old to sleep nights in a chair.

  Upstairs, the bedroom door was closed, whether still or again. I tiptoed into the bathroom, cleaned up. Downstairs, a quick note for Irma, “Had to go in, back when I can,” on the kitchen table, and I was out the door.

  Sadie’s Luncheonette, in the little strip mall a few blocks from our house, does a nice breakfast, and they leave a man alone to think while he eats. By the time I was done, I knew where I was going to start. I went out to the phone booth at the corner, opened my pocket notebook, and dialed Laurie Mansell’s number. Her husband told me she’d drawn Saturday duty in the lab. Good. I thanked him, walked out of the booth, got in the car, and drove off toward Pill Hill.

  ***

  The day before, Ms. Mansell had looked like the skin on her face was tightened with thumbscrews, but now she was a cute little blonde with dimples that made me want to put my fingers in them and twirl. She stiffened when I told her why I was there, but said yes, of course she’d be glad to help however she could, and she had about forty minutes before she needed to do the next procedure. She took me into her cubicle, then studied me across the desk. “You don’t like the smell in here, do you?”

  “You’re sharp. No, I don’t. It reminds me of the autopsy room. But you don’t work with flesh here.”

  “Sure we do. We have to kill mice—we call it ‘sacrificing’—to get the eggs out of their ovaries. Then, there are our tissue culture fluids, which have a lot of protein in them, sometimes even blood serum.” She shrugged. “We get used to it.”

  “That’s what they say in the autopsy rooms too.” I cleared my throat. “Let me ask you a few questions. Ms. Mansell. Some of them, we may have talked about yesterday, but don’t worry about that. Start with Dr. Hearn. She was the…what? Head of the lab?”

  “Officially, she was the Director and Principal Investigator. Except she was the only investigator.”

  “Who’s in charge now?”

  “I guess I am, since I’m the supervisor. Dr. Hearn’s grants are still in force, and Dr. Camnitz, the Department Chairman, wants to keep her experiments going while he tries to find another research scientist who could step in, maybe under a joint appointment with another department.”

  “Dr. Hearn didn’t have any postgraduate students?”

  Mansell licked at her lips. “Not any more…I mean, she once did. But she was pretty tough on them, and word got around, so for the past few years, no one’s applied.”

  “Hmm. What was the nature of her work?”

  “Early development in mouse embryos. Her main interest was looking into what causes chromosomes to behave abnormally at fertilization.”

  “Like in mongolism.”

  “Right, except now it’s called Down Syndrome. That’s where the embryo gets an extra Number Twenty-one chromosome. It’s the most common chromosomal aberration you see in human babies.”

  “So you fertilize eggs in a test tube, and watch to see what happens?”

  “In a petri dish, actually. That’s a flat, circular plastic culture dish. Embryos grow better in those than in test tubes. We also study embryos from natural fertilization, so we can compare different things at different stages, right up to where the embryos would implant into the uterus.”

  “Do you do any work on human embryos?”

  Mansell threw a hand to her mouth, but couldn’t stifle the snort. “Not in this lab. Dr. Camnitz won’t allow it. He says there’s too much controversy over the ethics, and we need to wait till it all settles out. He and Dr. Hearn had some real shouting matches. She told him if no one did the work because they were a
fraid of the controversy, it never would get done. One time she got really fried, and said it was lucky Dr. Camnitz wasn’t Galileo’s chairman…”

  I leaned forward. “What’re you thinking?”

  “I’m just wondering.”

  “Say it.”

  “Well, it’s something I’m not sure of, and I wouldn’t want to get someone in trouble.”

  “If it entered your mind, spit it out. Sometimes those maybes turn out to be important.”

  She drew a deep breath. “I think it’s possible Dr. Hearn might’ve been doing human work on the sly. One of the OBGYNs at Puget Community Hospital was always coming over to see her, and it occurred to me that he could have been bringing her some kind of samples. They’d go into her office and shut the door, then after he left, she’d go off to her little alcove around the corner, and work there for a while. The alcove has a small sterile hood, a dissecting microscope, and a tissue-culture incubator, which Dr. Hearn always kept locked. She was the only one who had a key.”

  I scratched at my chin. “What’s the doctor’s name?”

  Mansell hesitated. I made a come-on motion with my hand.

  “Dr. Sanford. Dr. Colin Sanford.”

  “Interesting. Dr. Sanford and Ms. Kennett told me Dr. Hearn did some kind of procedure to make Mr. Kennett’s sperm work better. Know anything about what that procedure could have been?”

  “Oh.” I saw a light go on. “It might’ve been Density Gradient Separation. That’s been a minor line of research in the lab for the past year or so. We kept finding white blood cells in the mouse sperm we were using to fertilize eggs, which meant the samples were infected, and since there are reports that centrifugation with specially-treated silica particles can separate white cells out of semen, we tried that, and it worked. But Dr. Hearn noticed something else. Not only did the treatment get rid of the white cells, but the most active sperm migrated into the densest silica layer. So she wondered if we could use the procedure to weed out weaker sperm from a sample so the healthier ones would have a better chance to fertilize the eggs. We’ve just recently begun to look at it in human sperm.”

  “Was that the work Dr. Hearn did in the alcove there?”

  “I don’t think so. She wouldn’t have needed the sterile hood and incubator. Those things make me think more of tissue culture.

  Tissue culture, tissue culture. “And Dr. Hearn had the only key to that locked incubator?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, no one’s opened it since yesterday?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Can we take a look at it?”

  She practically flew out of her chair. “Sure, if you want.”

  I followed her from the office, around a corner into a small alcove, then past a black workbench with a water faucet and sink at its center. In the far corner of the room was what looked like a plastic sheet. I walked over and tried to peek through it. “That’s the sterile hood,” Ms. Mansell said. “For tissue culture. You put on sterile gloves and a sterile gown, lay the petri dish on the heating plate inside to keep it at body temperature, and then stick your hands through those holes in the plastic sheet to do the manipulations.” She pointed to a small metal container on a shelf at the side of the hood, attached to the wall from below with steel bars running at forty-five degree angles. “That’s the incubator.”

  I tried to twist the handle on the door, no luck. “Anything about this incubator that might clue us in on the work Dr. Hearn did in here?”

  She shook her head. “It looks like an ordinary tissue-culture incubator with the usual maintenance and backup systems for carbon dioxide and temperature.”

  “All right. I guess I’ll have to hunt up the key. Can you tell me any more about the connection between Dr. Hearn and Dr. Sanford, and the work she was doing in here? Weren’t you or anyone else curious?”

  Mansell frowned, creased her forehead. “Maybe a little, mostly because of Dr. Hearn’s fights with Dr. Camnitz. But it’s not unusual for a PhD scientist to work with a clinician to get samples for one line or another of research. They do it all the time.”

  “How about the fact that she worked alone in this alcove and kept the incubator locked? Didn’t that strike anyone as odd?”

  “Well, sure. But look, Mr. Baumgartner. This was Dr. Hearn’s lab. She treated the techs well, but I told you before, she didn’t have any grad students because she could be pretty nasty if you got her back up. And frankly, if she was doing work she didn’t want Dr. Camnitz to know about, no one in the lab would’ve cared. Dr. Camnitz is…can I speak off the record?”

  I sighed. I can’t remember the last interview where somebody didn’t ask to speak off the record. “I’ll do whatever I can to see that you don’t get embarrassed, but I can’t make any promises.”

  She fidgeted, then let out a little laugh, pure nerves. “I guess I wouldn’t want Dr. Camnitz to know I’m saying this. Nobody in the lab likes him, he’s such a stuffed shirt. As far as he’s concerned, the lab exists for the glory of Dr. Camnitz. We joke that it’s the first item in the supervisor’s job description to make sure all the help—that’s what he calls us, ‘the help’—don’t forget it for a minute. Nobody in the lab would have said or done anything that would get Dr. Hearn in trouble with Dr. Camnitz, or even worse, get them caught between Dr. Hearn and Dr. Camnitz.”

  “How long have you been supervisor, Ms. Mansell?”

  “Since last September.”

  “Did the old supervisor leave?”

  “You could say that.” Another nervous laugh. “She didn’t come in to work one day, and no one ever heard from her after that. So they made me temporary supervisor, then after Alma…Alma Wanego had been gone a couple of weeks, they hired me permanently.”

  “This Alma Wanego never showed up again? Fell off the edge of the earth?”

  She nodded vigorously. “Yes.”

  “Didn’t anyone look into it?”

  “You mean like file a Missing Person Report?”

  “Like anything. When somebody disappears, usually people try to find her, for one reason or another.”

  “I know Dr. Hearn called her house the day she disappeared, and then a few days later, but all the landlady knew was that Alma didn’t come home one day, and she hadn’t seen her since. I guess Dr. Hearn didn’t think there was any reason to go to the police. Alma was a funny duck, Mr. Baumgartner. We all thought she’d most likely gone off somewhere on a whim.”

  “Didn’t she have any family? Friends? Someone who’d notice she was missing, and go looking for her?”

  “I don’t have any idea. She never talked about any family, or any friends, for that matter. She was pretty much a loner.”

  “Was she a good supervisor?”

  Little pause, then Mansell’s face creased into a crooked smile. “I guess you could say she kept the trains running on time.”

  “At the cost of executing an engineer or a conductor here and there?”

  Mansell took a moment to chew on her lip. “Actually, one tech did leave. Alma could be snippy, and it didn’t take much to get her dander up. She didn’t tolerate any backtalk, and you didn’t question anything she said. Never.”

  “Interesting. Did she and Dr. Hearn get along?”

  “Alma knew better than to mess with Dr. Hearn.”

  “Did Ms. Wanego do any work here in the alcove with Dr. Hearn?”

  “No. Absolutely not. No one did, not under any circumstances. I remember one time when Dr. Hearn was working in here, and I was doing a procedure with Alma around the corner, in the workroom. The other techs were in the main lab, one door down. We heard Dr. Hearn yell, ‘Shit’ and ‘God damn it.’ Alma ran in to see what had happened, but she came back faster than she’d gone in. She told me she’d seen a broken glass tube on the floor, with fluid all aroun
d it. Then we both heard Dr. Hearn talking on the phone extension in there. We couldn’t make out words, or who she was talking to, but then she slammed down the receiver, came through the workroom like a house on fire, charged into her office, and slammed the door. Alma went back into the alcove, just for a few seconds, and when she came back, she said the mess was cleaned up, and the pieces of the tube were in the wastebasket.” Mansell took me by the elbow. “I can show you where we were.”

  I followed her into the adjoining workroom. “See how from here you can look into the hallway? Next thing we knew after Dr. Hearn ran out, Dr. Sanford came tearing through there, toward Dr. Hearn’s office, and a few minutes later, we saw them both going back the other way, toward the supplies room. Dr. Hearn looked really upset. We thought Dr. Sanford was trying to calm her down.”

  “Then what?”

  “Nothing, at least as far as I know. A little while later, Dr. Hearn was back in the alcove, and spent pretty much the rest of the day there. She never said boo about what happened, and I sure wasn’t about to ask her.”

  “How about Ms. Wanego. Did you talk to her about it?”

  “Just once. A couple of days later, I said something like, I wonder what that fuss in the alcove was about, and she shut me right down. Told me walls have ears.”

  “Can you remember when it happened?”

  She closed her eyes, pursed her lips. Her forehead looked like corrugated cardboard. “It was the first week of last August, when we had that terrible heat wave. Everybody was on edge. Right around when Dr. Hearn’s accident happened, the techs were complaining to Alma about a janitor making too much noise, working in the hall outside the lab. Then someone made a stink about a blocked drain in the men’s room. It was crazy.”

  “Okay. And you became supervisor in September?”

  Mansell nodded. “First temporary, then permanent. Alma took a few days off the week before Labor Day and through the holiday weekend, so I was kind of in charge then. And she was back for…let’s see.” Mansell closed her eyes, counted on her fingers. “Right, four days before she disappeared. She came to work that Friday, but never showed up over the weekend or the next Monday.”