Addiction

by G. H. Ephron

  We slipped inside and closed both doors behind us. The room was pitch black with only a sliver of light between what must have been curtains over a window.

  “Peter?” Annie whispered.

  “Right here,” I said, and took a step in the direction of her voice.

  I felt her hand touch my shoulder, work its way down my arm, and hold my hand.

  Annie turned on her flashlight. The beam lit up each corner of the room, in turn. There were chairs, a standing lamp, a potted plant. She ran the light over the top of Jensen’s broad desk. It was cleared of all papers. The man was such an orderly soul. Even the pencils and pens on the desk blotter were lined up exactly perpendicular to the edge of the desk. The only element of disarray was a half-full Acu-Med mug. It still contained an inch of light coffee, the cream congealing at the edges in a tan circle.

  Annie tugged at the curtains so they overlapped. Then she turned on a table lamp.

  I went to Liam’s desk chair, sat, and rolled myself closer to the file cabinet. It was unlocked. I reached for the drawer I’d seen open. In my mind’s eye, I saw the jumble of purple file folders packed into the drawer and Liam’s foot trying to push it shut. I said a little prayer: Please tell me he hasn’t destroyed her work. I pulled. The drawer opened too easily. I knew before my eyes confirmed it that the overflow of files had been removed. The drawer was now three quarters full of neatly ordered, manila file folders, the tabs marching from left to right and back again. I pulled out one and read the typed label. “8.3641. DX-200 trial.” It contained the records documenting the treatment of the DX-200 drug-trial participant who’d been assigned code number 8.3641. At the front of the drawer was a folder labeled “CRFs DX-200 Trial.” I pulled it out.

  “Find what you’re looking for?” Annie asked.

  “No. Those file folders I saw in here are gone. But hang on a minute. Here’s something else. The reports of adverse drug reactions from the DX-200 trial.”

  God bless Liam’s orderly little brain. There were about two dozen sheets of paper, each with a date, a patient number, and the description of an adverse event. Nausea. Dizziness. A depression with suicidal thoughts. Fatigue. I kept going. A minor heart attack was the closest thing to a death.

  These were all subjects who’d completed the trial. What about the ones who hadn’t? In the back of the drawer, I found the folder I was looking for. It contained the records of patients who’d dropped out of the trial. There were only three. Two had dropped out for “personal reasons.” A third because of car trouble. I wondered if one of them was the dead man Channing was urging Jensen to report.

  “Annie, is it hard to find out if somebody is dead?”

  “Depends. With a Social Security number, takes about thirty seconds.”

  Two of the dropouts were female. Couldn’t be either of them. The dropout with car trouble was a man. I read Annie his Social Security number, and she wrote it down in her little black book.

  “How we doing for time?” she asked.

  I checked my watch. It was 2:40. “We’re fine. Security starts its sweep in twenty minutes.”

  I put the files away, straightened them, and closed the drawer. I checked that the room was the way we’d found it. The only thing out of place was that Acu-Med mug. There it was on the desk, when it needed to be washed and put back into the A position in the lineup of mugs on top of the file cabinet.

  “Everything okay?” Annie asked.

  “Just a little déjà vu. When I found Channing’s body, there was an Acu-Med mug on her desk, too. The police claim there wasn’t one when they examined the room.”

  “Is that unusual?” Annie asked.

  “No,” I admitted. After all, they give them to all the docs. “Still. I can’t help wondering if this is the one that was on Channing’s desk and then disappeared by the time the police took crime scene photos.”

  I was about to turn off the desk lamp when I noticed Jensen’s briefcase, standing alongside the desk. It was open. Just like I keep my briefcase, open beside me while I’m working in my office. I might easily leave a dirty coffee cup on my desk or forget my briefcase if I left the office in a hurry. Liam Jensen seemed a lot less likely to do such a thing—unless he was only off to the men’s room or checking on a patient.

  Suddenly, I was anxious to get out of there. I turned off the desk lamp, and we left. I closed the office doors quietly behind us.

  We hurried past Channing’s office. The door was still padlocked. Now there was a square of pink paint on the wall where the plaque with her name on it had been removed.

  Annie froze in front of Daphne’s office. The door was open a crack. There was a light on inside. Was she working late? Maybe Jensen was here, working with her.

  Instinct pushed me to get away quickly before one of them heard us. Then, common sense took over. Annie and I hadn’t been that quiet. With the door open, anyone inside surely would have heard us by now.

  I put my hand on the knob. If Channing had entrusted her research results to anyone, Daphne was the most likely person—if the files had, in fact, been entrusted to someone, as opposed to having been taken from Channing’s office after her death. If Jensen had taken them, I could easily see Daphne confronting him, removing the files from his office, and putting them away safely in her own. Then, perhaps out of some misguided sense of loyalty to the institute, she wasn’t letting on that she had them. It would take only a minute to check.

  I pulled the outer door open and paused. I listened. I pushed the inner door open. The room exhaled stale cigarettes. The desk light was on.

  “Peter?”

  I jumped at the sound of Annie’s voice. I told her, “This is the office of the woman who’s now head of clinical trials for the institute. Daphne Smythe-Gooding. You met her at Channing’s party. She was Channing’s mentor and had Channing’s research report. I wonder …”

  “Well, if you’re going in, you’d better make it snappy.”

  I was beyond caution. “Right. Just a quick look.”

  I stepped inside. The office seemed a bit more chaotic than it was the last time I’d been there. Yellow Post-its lined the wall above the desk. Only a single nut was left in the candy bowl, along with a pile of empty foil wrapping and miniature Hershey’s Kisses streamers. The African violet looked tired, its leaves spread out and limp, the flowers curled and brown. There was no sweater on the back of her chair. No open briefcase alongside the desk.

  On top of other papers on her desk was a scale drawing on blue paper. It was of an engraved tablet, over five feet tall. Along the side, on some lines labeled Inscription:, Daphne had written her husband’s name, his dates of birth and death, “Revered scholar, beloved husband, brother, uncle,” and the words “Called back before his time.”

  The monument was impressive, far more massive than most gravestones in modern cemeteries. With its fussy floral carving surrounding the inscription, it felt Victorian.

  I hadn’t had to pick out a gravestone for Kate. I knew she’d have been horrified at the thought of her bones taking up eternal space on a crowded earth. Instead, I made a pilgrimage to Martha’s Vineyard and scattered her ashes from our favorite picnic spot, a bluff along the Moshup Trail overlooking the ocean.

  I left the drawing where it was and quickly checked Daphne’s four file cabinets. They were all unlocked. I was on the final drawer of the last one, having found nothing that resembled Channing’s research, when Annie whistled. “Does everyone around here operate a little pharmacy out of their office?”

  She was peering into an open bottom desk drawer. Inside were boxes of drug samples. Zoloft. Prozac. Valium.

  “Pretty typical,” I said. “The hospital has a policy that drug samples are supposed to be locked up, but it doesn’t always happen.” Then I spotted a blister pack of Ativan on the desk. Some of the pills were gone. That wasn’t so typical. “Maybe she left in a hurry. After all, she left the light on.”

  The window rattled as a gust of wind pelted rain a
gainst it.

  “We should get going,” Annie said.

  We had ten minutes. I closed up the file drawers and left the light on, the desk drawer open, and the doors ajar as we’d found them. We hurried to the nearest stairs—they were at the opposite end of the building from the ones we’d come up.

  I followed Annie into the darkness. With all the amenities in this building, why the hell wasn’t there any emergency lighting in the stairways?

  “Annie, where are you?” I whispered.

  “I’m here, just ahead of you,” she answered, shushing me as the door shut to the hallway, making the dark even darker.

  I groped for a something to hold onto. I connected with the wall of wooden spindles, like the one that ran up and down along the inside of the other staircase we’d come up.

  I heard Annie starting down the stairs.

  “Where’s your flashlight,” I said as I stumbled forward, pushing myself to move quickly, using the wooden spindles along the inside of the staircase to guide me along.

  “I’m looking for it,” Annie said. She unzipped her pack. We were almost down to the next landing. “Where the hell did I … Should be in here somewhere … . Aha!” The flashlight went on. Annie flashed it up at me, then on the floor in front of her. The beam reflected off the landing. It was coated with what looked like a light powder, streaked with scuff marks. “Looks like …” Annie said as she stepped forward. “Whoa!” Her foot slid. She skidded and landed with a thud. The flashlight somersaulted out of Annie’s hand and bounced on the floor. I lunged for it.

  “Watch out, Peter, don’t,” Annie cried out, but it was too late. The flashlight had rolled off the edge of the step and disappeared into the air shaft. I grabbed for the wooden spindles to keep from falling over. But where the wall of spindles was supposed to be, it wasn’t. I bellowed as I fell forward, flailing, knowing that if I kept going, I’d follow the flashlight down to the basement.

  Annie grabbed me from behind, just in time.

  “Holy shit,” I muttered, as I regained my footing.

  I stood there on the stairs, gasping for breath. My heart felt as if it were trying to hammer its way out of my chest. My shirt was sticking to my back. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I could see that there was a wide gap in the wall of wooden spindles. I groped for where they should have been, swung my arm one way, then the other. “What in the hell?” I said. There was about a three-foot-wide gap in the spindles. I reached up. I touched what felt like jagged edges where the spindles had been broken off overhead.

  Cautiously, I leaned out into the airshaft and looked down. It was dark and hard to see much of anything. But the beam of Annie’s flashlight was visible, all the way down at the basement floor. Amazing that it was still working, after a four-story fall onto a concrete floor.

  The sound of footsteps echoed up from below. We pulled back into the shadows and waited. The footsteps grew louder. It sounded like a door was being opened at the base of the stairwell. A man’s voice echoed up, “Anybody in there? What the hell is wrong with the lights?”

  A strong beam of light rushed up to fill the airshaft. An alarm blared, and red lights on each of the landings started flashing. The light confirmed what I’d surmised—about a dozen wooden spindles had been broken away, leaving a hole that the flashlight had fallen through, and through which I easily could have followed.

  “They shouldn’t find you here,” I said to Annie.

  Annie scrambled to her feet. “Don’t worry about me. With any luck, I’ll meet you later, somewhere near the tunnel entrance.”

  She brushed her hands on her dark pants, leaving light handprints. I touched the floor of the landing. The light particles that coated it were coarse. I sniffed. Sawdust. That’s when I realized that though the wooden spindles were broken away at the top, at the bottom they’d been sawn through.

  I crouched and leaned out over the airshaft. The flashing lights made the air pulsate. A man lay sprawled on the basement floor. Dark pants, jacket. His arms were splayed and his legs twisted grotesquely. A bald security guard was leaning over and picking up Annie’s flashlight, which had landed on the man’s back. Soft landing—that explained why the flashlight still worked. He examined it. Turned it off. Then he looked up.

  “Don’t move,” the security guard barked up at me.

  19

  IT TOOK the security guard a few moments to turn off the alarm. My ears were still ringing, long into the silence. When I shut my eyes to clear my head, circles popped like flashbulbs behind my closed eyelids.

  The guard hollered up at me again, and I identified myself. He told me to come down and wait with him. He’d called the security office, and the police were on their way. I descended to the bottom of the staircase and stepped into the base of the airshaft.

  The guard hadn’t turned the body over, but he didn’t need to. I recognized the Brioni jacket. It was Liam Jensen. And I knew he was dead. His head and forearm lay in a pool of blood. In death, he seemed smaller. In some disconnected corner of my brain, I envisioned bones telescoping as a body lands on a concrete floor.

  I turned away. I felt the emotional dam that had erected itself eroding. The last thing I wanted to do was close my eyes and be alone in my head with my memories. I felt drained and tired as I slumped against the wall. I stared down at my hands and twisted my wedding ring.

  We waited. About ten minutes later, I heard footsteps clumping down the hall. Voices. I took a deep breath and turned my hands into fists, forcing energy into my arms. I straightened my back, squared my shoulders. By the time MacRae and his partner appeared, I was ready.

  All MacRae said was, “You again.”

  He snapped on some latex gloves and quickly examined the body. “Who is he?”

  “Dr. Liam Jensen,” I said. “Head of the Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Unit. This building.”

  MacRae had his pad out. He flipped it open and started to write. “J?”

  “J-E-N-S-E-N,” I said. “Liam. L-I-A-M. MD.”

  MacRae wrote quickly, paused, added some more scribbles. “How the hell did he …” MacRae squinted up into the air shaft. “Jee-zus H. Christ. Fell from way up there. Accident?”

  “Doubtful,” I replied.

  MacRae didn’t look surprised. He was eyeing my sneakers, which were coated with sawdust. “You were up there?”

  I nodded. “I almost fell through the hole myself. The lights weren’t working.”

  MacRae glanced around the base of the stairs until his attention snagged on an empty light socket. “Is that the emergency lighting?” he asked.

  “Looks like someone sawed through the wooden supports between the third and fourth floors,” I said. “If Jensen was coming down and lost his balance or was pushed, it wouldn’t have taken much pressure to break through.”

  MacRae looked at me speculatively. “You here alone or have you got company?” For a dumb guy, he was uncanny.

  I brushed the sawdust off my pant leg. “I don’t see anyone with me, do you?”

  “How long have you been in the building?”

  How long had Jensen been dead, I wondered. “I’ve been here for about an hour.”

  “And before that?”

  “With a friend. Since ten.”

  “You don’t work in this building, do you?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Two suspicious deaths in as many weeks. And you’re here both times.” He eyed me up and down, registering the black pants, black shirt.

  I stared back. I tried to remind myself that he was only doing his job, but all I could think was, what did Annie see in this asshole, anyway?

  “So what are you doing here now, sneaking around in the middle of the night?” He looked at me, waiting for an explanation. I folded my arms and stared back at him. He planted his feet, hooked his fingers in his pant loops, and didn’t blink.

  There were footsteps overhead. We both looked up.

  “Hullo? Who’s there?” Arnold Destler was g
azing down from the main floor, a flight up. “What in the name of God is going on?” he barked.

  Destler thumped down the stairs. He arrived wearing gray sweats, looking like an overstuffed sock with a very pink head sticking out one end. I’d never seen him out of a suit, without his bow tie. “I came over as soon as Security notified me,” he said.

  He approached Jensen gingerly, up on the balls of his feet. “Poor devil,” he said. He looked up into the airshaft, probably calculating the institute’s liability. Then he took inventory of all of us crowded in at the base of the stairs. Security. Police. Me.

  “Peter?”

  “He was here when Security discovered the body,” MacRae said. “He was just about to explain what he’s doing here.”

  “Research,” I said, the word popping out of nowhere.

  “Research?” MacRae echoed in disbelief.

  “Our staff are very dedicated, Detective,” Destler said. I tried not to look surprised, but Destler was the last person I’d expect to leap to my defense. “It’s not unusual to find us working into the wee hours of the morning. I was even working late myself.” Destler was a renowned workaholic—known to hole up in his office long after the rest of us had gone home to our lives.

  By now, additional officers had arrived, including a medical examiner. He asked us to give him some space so he could do his work. We shifted into the corridor.

  “This isn’t even your unit,” MacRae pointed out.

  I was about to answer when my beeper went off.

  Destler said evenly, “Medical research crosses organizational boundaries. We try not to operate in individual stovepipes. Isn’t that so, Dr. Zak?”

  “We try not to,” I said. The beeper was blinking the number of the nurses’ station on my unit. I looked up. Destler and MacRae were waiting for me to say more. “There’s some work being done here using Kutril, an extract of kudzu, to treat addiction. I was looking for the raw data.” I needed to get to a phone.