Fatal Care

by Leonard Goldberg

  “Don’t tell me they’re growing these, too,” Jake said, awestruck.

  “I guess.”

  Joanna stared at the giant salmon, not liking what she saw. Genetically altering plants was one thing, but doing it to living creatures was another. And if they could do it to a fish, they could do it to humans.

  “How do they grow them so big?” Jake asked.

  “We genetically modify them,” Brennerman said, coming up behind them. “We splice a growth hormone gene into their DNA, and that doubles their growth rate.”

  Jake watched a fish do a belly roll and then dive to the bottom for food. “Is there any limit to how big they can get?”

  Brennerman considered the question carefully before answering. “We could probably double their size again if we wished.”

  “And how the hell are giant fish like that going to feed themselves?”

  “That’s a major limiting factor,” Brennerman said, surprised at the detective’s insight into a biological matter. “The bigger they become, the more food they require. Eventually they could eat so much that the smaller creatures in the food chain would suffer.”

  Kind of like humans in Latin America, Jake was thinking. The big ones at the top ate so much there was damn little left for the others. He gave the fish a final look and then turned to Brennerman. “Thanks for seeing us on such short notice.”

  “No problem,” Brennerman said, and then he glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was close enough to hear the conversation. “This Alex Mirren business is shocking beyond words. Can you even begin to envision the embarrassment to his family?”

  “How much family has he got?” Jake asked.

  “A divorced wife and a daughter living in Florida.”

  “Well, with any luck the kinky details of his murder won’t reach the press there.”

  “Murder!” Brennerman said loudly and then quickly looked around to see if anyone had overheard. The technicians still had their heads down, apparently busily working away. Brennerman lowered his voice. “No one said anything about murder.”

  “Tune in the six o’clock news tonight,” Jake said, and brought out his notepad. “It seems somebody decided to strangle him while he was tied to his bed.”

  “Will the news media give out all the details?”

  Jake stared at him incredulously. “Are you kidding? Chances are, they’ll call it the Silk Stocking Strangler.”

  Brennerman shook his head sadly. “Bad for the Mirren family, bad for Bio-Med.”

  And particularly bad for Alex Mirren, Jake thought humorlessly. “Did Mirren have any enemies you know of?”

  “None,” Brennerman said promptly. “He tended to be a loner, but he had no real enemies.”

  “Did he get along with the people here at Bio-Med?”

  “As far as I know.”

  Bullshit, Joanna was thinking. “He was kind of rough on Nancy Tanaka, wasn’t he?”

  Brennerman shrugged. “That was just Alex’s temperament. He demanded perfection from everybody, including himself.”

  “Mmm,” Joanna murmured, unconvinced.

  “Look,” Brennerman said, his voice harder now. “Alex may have been tough as hell, but he was a good scientist, and people liked to work with him, including Nancy Tanaka. If she was so miserable, she could have left here at any time.”

  “Good point,” Joanna said. But it wasn’t. Because Nancy was sleeping with Mirren and maybe playing all sorts of sexual games with him. And maybe she liked that part of it.

  “Do you know of anybody who would gain financially from Mirren’s death?” Jake asked.

  “No one.”

  “Maybe his ex-wife?”

  Brennerman shook his head. “She cleaned him out at their divorce two years ago. It was so bad Mirren had to borrow money against his Bio-Med stock options.” Brennerman shook his head again. “No, Lieutenant, nobody gained from Alex Mirren’s death.”

  Sure somebody did, Jake wanted to say. That’s why they had him whacked. “So, only Bio-Med ends up losing here?”

  Brennerman nodded. “He was our very best scientist. He was responsible for a half-dozen patents that Bio-Med owns.”

  Jake asked quickly, “Was Mirren entitled to royalties from those patents?”

  “Absolutely,” Brennerman replied. “He would have received two percent of the net profit from each patent.”

  “Would have?”

  “The patents had not become commercially viable yet, but they would have some time down the road.”

  “How much money are we talking about here?” Jake asked.

  “Perhaps as much as two million a year.”

  Jake whistled softly. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “He earned it.”

  Jake wrote a note in his notepad. “Who will eventually get those royalties now that Mirren is dead?”

  Brennerman gestured with his hands, palms out. “I have no idea. You’ll have to check his will.”

  “Oh, we’ll do that,” Jake assured him.

  A technician came over and handed Brennerman a message. He read it rapidly before crushing it into a ball. “Would you excuse me for a moment? I have an urgent phone call.”

  Joanna watched him walk away; then she turned to Jake and spoke in a low voice. “What do you think?”

  “I think he’s covering up for Mirren.”

  “Covering what?”

  “The fun and games,” Jake said, gazing up at the sunbeams coming through the skylight. “He knows everything about Mirren—his divorce, his ex-wife, his money problems, everything. I suspect he knew about the freaky sex games, too. That’s why he wasn’t too bothered about the Mirren business. That was the word he used. Business. And he only really got upset when I mentioned murder, didn’t he?”

  Joanna nodded. “And he wanted us to believe everything was fine between Mirren and Nancy Tanaka.”

  “That, too,” Jake agreed. “And remember, we found her pajamas in Mirren’s bedroom. She may have been part of his sexual games. That being the case, Brennerman is doing his best to cover up this sex business.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know,” Jake said, lowering his voice as Brennerman approached. “But Nancy Tanaka might.”

  “Sorry about the interruption,” Brennerman told them. “That was a call from our Canadian colleagues who are working with us on the giant salmon project. The Canadian government has given its approval for us to start a fish farm in Nova Scotia.” A pleased look came over Brennerman’s face. “The number of people this project will be able to feed is incredible.”

  Almost as incredible as the number of dollars you’ll make from it, Joanna thought. And the only people it will end up feeding are those who can afford salmon.

  Joanna brought her mind back to business and reached into her purse for a stack of file cards. She studied the top one briefly. “Eric, I’m afraid Alex Mirren is not the only disaster you’re going to have to face up to. We’ve run into more problems with the lipolytic enzyme preparation.”

  Brennerman’s face grew very serious. “What’s happened?”

  “Another patient has developed cancer.”

  Joanna described the sixty-year-old man who had come down with a high-grade kidney cancer after the enzyme preparation was injected into his renal arteries. “This is the third malignancy to occur in the thirty patients who received the preparation,” she said. “That’s a ten percent incidence. There can be no doubt that this preparation somehow induces cancer in humans.”

  “I can’t believe the enzyme is a carcinogen,” Brennerman said, visibly shaken. “Enzymes just don’t do that. There’s never been an enzyme in nature that caused cancer.”

  “Well, then, we may be looking at a first.”

  Brennerman rubbed at his chin worriedly. “I guess it’s possible that a contaminant got into the preparation somehow. But if it was there, we never detected it.”

  “Nor did we,” Joanna said, and went to another file card. “
But we did notice something unusual about the preparations given to the patients who later developed cancer. They didn’t contain any preservative. There was no benzyl alcohol in them.”

  Brennerman wrinkled his brow, concentrating and thinking back. Slowly he nodded. “There was one batch of the enzyme preparation that we decided to purify by ultrafiltration. That process removed any bacteria or viruses and obviated the need for a preservative.”

  “Was there some reason why ultrafiltration was used on just that one batch?”

  Brennerman thought again. “I believe that Mirren had read a recent publication that indicated benzyl alcohol might denature or interfere with the activities of certain enzymes. But fortunately that didn’t turn out to be the case here. So we went back to using benzyl alcohol as a preservative, which was cheaper and much less time consuming than ultrafiltration.”

  “Did Mirren do all the work on the preservatives?”

  Brennerman nodded. “He and Nancy Tanaka. We can check with her on that later.”

  “I’d like to check with her right now,” Joanna said, seeing her opening. “While I’m doing that, you can give Lieutenant Sinclair some more background information on Alex Mirren.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said immediately. “There’s a bunch of things I need to know about Alex Mirren.”

  “Fine, but—” Brennerman was about to say something to Joanna but changed his mind. “If you require any technical details, just let me know.”

  “I will,” Joanna said.

  She walked across the expansive laboratory, feeling the eyes of the technicians on her. They kept their heads down, but they were following Joanna in their peripheral vision, waiting to see who she wanted to question. And about what. Joanna could sense an air of tension in the laboratory. But no sadness. Not even an iota.

  Joanna approached the workbench where Nancy Tanaka was carefully pipetting a clear liquid into a row of test tubes. A young brunette technician was seated nearby, hunched over a microscope, her hearing obviously focused so as not to miss a word.

  Joanna tapped the brunette gently on her shoulder. “I wonder if you could excuse us for a few minutes.”

  “Sure,” the technician said, wanting desperately to stay within earshot. “Would you like me to move down a few rows?”

  “I want you to go get a cup of coffee,” Joanna said firmly.

  “Okay,” the technician said, pushing herself away from the microscope.

  Joanna waited for the young woman to walk away, and then she sat next to Nancy Tanaka. “Do you remember me from my first visit to Bio-Med?”

  “Of course,” Nancy said quietly. “It’s nice to see you again, Dr. Blalock.”

  “We have to talk.”

  Nancy nodded slightly. “I know.”

  “About Alex Mirren.”

  Nancy hesitated, her eyes looking away from Joanna’s. “He was not a bad person. I think you saw him on a day when things were not going well for him.”

  “So you liked him?”

  “He was a very good scientist.”

  Joanna stared at Nancy, trying to read her expression. “That’s not what I asked you.”

  “We got along all right,” Nancy said, her eyelids fluttering involuntarily.

  She’s lying, Joanna thought. Jake had once told her that fluttering eyelids were a sure sign of lying. “Did you see him socially?”

  “No,” Nancy said hastily.

  Joanna leaned in closer to Nancy and lowered her voice. “So far you’ve told me three lies in less than two minutes.”

  “I have not,” Nancy said defiantly.

  Joanna counted the lies on her fingers. “One—you told me he wasn’t a bad person, and he was. Two—you said you got along with him, and you didn’t. Three—you told me you didn’t see him socially, and you did.”

  “I didn’t—”

  Joanna held up an index finger, interrupting her. “You’re not a suspect here, but if you keep lying to me you’ll become one. And then there’ll be a detective who questions you and not me. Believe me when I tell you how unpleasant that can be. Particularly when they sit you in an interrogation room that has a one-way mirror so half the world can spy on you.”

  Nancy took a deep breath and swallowed audibly. “He was a mean bastard. He seemed to take delight in belittling those who worked around him.”

  “Why did you put up with that?”

  “The money,” Nancy said matter-of-factly. “I made fifty thousand a year plus benefits and stock options. That’s very good for somebody with a master’s degree in microbiology.”

  “But you saw him socially, too.”

  Nancy’s eyes narrowed into slits. Her lips stayed shut.

  “We found your pajamas in the dresser in Alex Mirren’s bedroom,” Joanna went on. “And a kimono in the closet. And there were personal items in the bathroom that will no doubt have your fingerprints on them.”

  “I—I’m so ashamed,” Nancy whispered.

  “You slept with him?”

  Nancy nodded. “Five or six times. But there was no real feeling. Nothing was there.”

  Did you do it for the money? Joanna was about to ask, but decided not to. “Was he into kinky things?”

  “The last time I was with him, he wanted me to tie him up and hit him,” Nancy said, her voice barely above a whisper. “With a damn whip.”

  “Did you?”

  Nancy shook her head. “I ran out as fast as I could and left all my things behind. That’s why you found my pajamas and kimono there.”

  “And I’ll bet that’s when he became really mean to you in the laboratory.”

  “It became almost intolerable,” Nancy said. “The littlest mistake would cause him to rant and rave. If anything went wrong, it was always my fault. And to be doubly mean, he transferred me out of the stem cell lab and back into the general laboratory. That cost me five thousand a year.”

  “Why did it cost you that?”

  “Because the technician who works in the hot zone lab receives a bonus,” Nancy explained. “You know, you have to put on a space suit and hook yourself up to an oxygen supply. It was a fucking pain in the ass.”

  Joanna grinned at the unexpected profanity. But good, she thought. Nancy was loosening up and the truth would flow out now. “Did Mirren give you a reason for transferring you out of the hot zone lab?”

  “There was no good reason,” Nancy said sharply. “So he just made one up. One day I went into the side room off the hot zone to look for some equipment. Mirren caught me in there and went wild, yelling and screaming about contamination—which was so much crap.”

  Joanna asked, “What was in the side room?”

  “Nothing except for a small steel table with some surgical instruments on it. Things like scissors and scalpels and stuff like that.”

  “What would they use surgical instruments for?”

  Nancy shrugged. “I guess for the experimental animals they work on. We do a fair amount of research on mice and rats. Anyhow, they transferred me out and dropped my salary by five thousand per year.”

  “Just because you walked into that side room?”

  Nancy shook her head. “That was the excuse. The real reason Mirren transferred me out was because I wouldn’t sleep with him anymore.”

  “He wasn’t a very nice person,” Joanna said as she reached for her file cards. “I appreciate your being so honest with me.”

  “Will I still have to talk with the detective?”

  “That won’t be necessary now.”

  Nancy Tanaka breathed an audible sigh of relief.

  Joanna looked at the file card on enzyme preparation. “I need a little bit of information from you on the lipolytic enzyme made by Bio-Med.”

  “Sure,” Nancy said, obviously happy to change the subject. “What do you need?”

  “All of the enzyme preparations had the preservative benzyl alcohol added to them. Right?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “But one batch didn’t,” J
oanna went on. “It had no preservative at all.”

  Nancy wrinkled up her face. “That’s strange.”

  “According to Brennerman, this batch was supposedly purified by ultrafiltration,” Joanna added. “Does that ring a bell?”

  Nancy thought for a moment, and then slowly nodded. “Yes. I remember now. They were concerned that the alcohol preservative might somehow interfere with the enzyme’s activity. So we purified several batches by ultrafiltration. We triple-checked to make certain nothing was growing in those preparations, so I can guarantee you they were free of microorganisms.”

  “And you added nothing else to those batches?”

  “Nothing,” Nancy assured her. “And we eventually found that the alcohol really didn’t interfere with the enzymes, so we went back to using it as a preservative.”

  “Good,” Joanna said, but her mind was now back in the hot zone and the side room next to it. She wondered how many more side rooms there were in the hot zone area and what kinds of experiments they did back there. Perhaps Nancy Tanaka could provide more details if she really thought about it.

  Nancy was glancing nervously over her shoulder. Brennerman and the detective were slowly making their way across the laboratory.

  Joanna said quickly, “Nancy, I’d like to talk with you some more, but away from here. Would that be possible?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you live close by here?”

  “Not too far. My house is in Canyon Country.”

  Joanna wrote down the address. Canyon Country was a pleasant middle-class neighborhood that was located south of Lancaster. “Why don’t we do lunch? That way you can teach me all about the enzyme preparation and the hot zone laboratory. And we’ll bill Memorial Hospital for it.”

  “Sounds good,” Nancy said as if she meant it. “Let me jot down my phone number for you.”

  “Well, thanks for your help,” Joanna said, loud enough for the approaching Eric Brennerman to hear. She placed the file cards back into her purse and stood.

  “Did Nancy clear up the benzyl alcohol business for you?” Brennerman asked.

  “She certainly did,” Joanna answered. “It was exactly as you said. There was some concern that alcohol might interfere with the enzyme’s activity.”