Deadly Science

by Ken Brigham

  Shane polished the glass with a bar towel. He took down a bottle from a shelf. The intricately etched label on the bottle read Lincoln College, Oxford, Sherry. KiKi had somehow managed to get the special sherry from his Oxford College alma mater shipped to them in Nashville. He had no idea how she accomplished that. But he wasn’t surprised. KiKi was a very resourceful woman. The sherry was mainly for him. KiKi rarely drank alcohol. Her explanation was that she was too fond of the human brain’s normal functions to impair them with drugs of any kind, including ethanol. She didn’t mean that as criticism of people who did drink. It’s just that, if she had a vice, it wasn’t alcohol.

  Shane thought KiKi would be home by now. But you could never be certain when she would return from these Sunday morning meetings of what had been dubbed the Brain Trust—Sunday school, she called it. When that group of neuroscientists got deep into discussions of their research, they often lost track of time. Shane was glad she hadn’t arrived in the middle of the Bonz business. She was not fond of violence and to witness it firsthand on her doorstep would have been unsettling. Just hearing about it would be bad enough.

  The noise from the alley, the cacophony of violent crime and its aftermath, had died down. Lonnie’s was opening up. Shane could hear the wail of a bottom tier country singer blaring from the loudspeaker outside Lonnie’s. A slightly off-color song, something about Viagra sung to the tune of Elvira, a hit for some country quartet a few years back.

  Wail was the right description. There was always some good country music in the honkytonks on Lower Broad; they were venues for the up and comers. But if that was ever true of the alley, it hadn’t been for several years. The up and comers these days left the alley’s seedier territory to the hapless has-beens and the no-talent wannabees. Shane had become oddly fond of those sounds. The Printers Alley Serenade, he called it. In his more sober moments, he empathized with the plaintive wail of the hapless has-beens.

  He refilled his glass and sat staring at the flashing neon reflections in the window. He thought again about how the fleeing murderer ran, the funny asymmetry of his gait. There was something definitely familiar about that. But for the life of him he couldn’t remember what. And multiple shots to the head? Odd, almost like a gangland execution. But it didn’t look like a professional job. Any halfway expert killer would have done a neater job. It didn’t make sense. Whatever petty crime went on in the alley wouldn’t interest the big-time criminals. If there was organized crime in the city it would be centered elsewhere—maybe Music Row or the more creative parts of the city to the north.

  And why kill the dog?

  Chapter 2

  When Katya Karpov turned off Church Street into the alley, she sensed something was wrong. For one thing it was deserted, unusual for a Sunday evening after the clubs opened. Lonnie’s loudspeaker was blasting into the empty space—Viagra , Viagra/My heart’s on fire/for Viagra. The same phrase over and over like a stuck record. The tangle of neon spanning the narrow alley was in full bloom. But there were no people. And Bonz wasn’t sitting on his habitual perch outside his bar. Something wasn’t right. She punched the garage door opener and eased the white Porsche into the narrow space under the balcony.

  Dr. Karpov’s arrival in the alley always attracted attention. She was oblivious to the attention. She was used to being noticed but it didn’t matter to her. That’s just how things were. Part of life. She always kept the car top open except when it rained because she liked the feel of the open car. She and Shane had the only garage that opened directly off the alley and the sight of this gorgeous woman wearing big designer sunglasses in a fancy car breezing into the alley, waves of blonde hair wafting in the wind, and disappearing under the balcony triggered the imaginations of the gaggle of strangers who came from everywhere to Nashville looking for the glamorous TV and fan magazine brand of the country music scene. They wouldn’t find that in the alley. Katya’s late afternoon arrivals were about all the glamour that was to be seen there. It would take a seriously active imagination to turn that brief tableau into any generalization about the city. Who knew what stories the strangers imagined? Whatever the stories they concocted it was unlikely that they were as interesting as the real one.

  “What’s up in the alley?” Katya asked Shane.

  Before he could answer, she bent over and kissed him full and soft on the mouth. Among her considerable assemblage of physical assets, Shane had always thought that KiKi’s mouth ranked near the top. The feel and taste of her full lips still excited him. It wasn’t the same as before the accident, but the thrill wasn’t gone. He couldn’t imagine that it would ever be.

  “Well, KiKi,” Shane said. “It’s been a pretty exciting day around here.”

  Shane was the only person in the world who called her KiKi, a phonetic play on her initials that Shane had come up with shortly after they met. She liked the familiarity, intimacy, of how he used the nickname. She often smiled when he called her that. Shane reached an arm up around her waist and pulled her as close as he could.

  “Where’s Bonz?” she said.

  “Somebody killed Bonz,” he answered, sounding like his old matter-of-fact police officer self, “Just apparently came into the alley, shot him dead and ran away. Killed his dog too.”

  “Damn!” Katya blurted, “Damn! Who on God’s earth would do such a thing?”

  Shane knew that KiKi was fond of Bonz. He was too. The old guy had been a fixture in the alley for as long as anyone could remember. In earlier days, his club had been a launching pad for future country stars. Bonz had befriended Hank Williams, Boots Randolph, Chet Atkins, a long list of Nashville luminaries when their stars were just starting to rise. All that had been a long time ago. But even in his dotage, Bonz was still a sympathetic figure. All the alley regulars were fond of him. He was part of the place. A fixture.

  Katya was fond of Bonz personally, like everybody else, but she also had a professional interest in him. He had been part of the initial clinical trial of Cy’s drug. Bonz had been their poster child, at least at first. Katya had begun to suspect that his striking initial response to the drug had taken a bad turn. She mentioned that one time to Cy and he pooh-poohed it.

  “We know he got a good response,” Cy had said. “We have the proof!”

  Katya knew the proof well. There were the computerized tests of brain function. And also the blood protein measurements. Cy put a lot of stock in those. He was completely convinced that the protein that was discovered in his laboratory was a perfect biomarker for Alzheimer’s. Katya thought that might be true but her conviction didn’t reach the evangelical depth of Cy’s.

  Bonz was scheduled to see Katya the next day for the physical exam that would conclude his participation in the drug study. She had also scheduled him for some follow up cognitive testing without telling Cy. Now she would never know whether her suspicion that his condition was worsening was justified. Never have any objective evidence. While the tragedy of Bonz’s murder was bigger than Katya’s suspicion about his response to Cy’s drug, some hard evidence supporting that suspicion would have been more important than she knew at the time.

  “Have you talked to Bonz much recently?” Katya asked.

  “Not really,” Shane answered. “I wave at him, say cheerio. That’s about all. Why?”

  “I try to strike up a conversation with him every now and then when I come home,” she said. “But lately it seemed to me that he wasn’t quite his old self.”

  “His old self was pretty hard to get a handle on. Has been for a while now. Not sure how you’d know if he was taking further leave of his senses.”

  “But he got a lot better there for a while, didn’t he?”

  “Maybe. Difficult to tell from where I sit.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. But we did the follow-up testing after he started on Cy’s drug and the results were pretty convincing.”

  Shane had only a vague understanding of what Katya did professionally. She had told him about the phase I-
II clinical trials of the drug and that Bonz was a subject, but he hadn’t been very curious about the details. He really couldn’t say that he noticed any effect on the old man’s behavior. Still sat out there holding the dog and striking up conversations with the passersby. Whether those conversations made any more sense than they ever had, Shane had no idea.

  “I’d scheduled him to come in for some more tests,” Katya mused. “I really wanted to document his current condition.”

  “His current condition is pretty clearly documented,” Shane responded.

  “Yeah. Sad,” she said.

  Hardy Seltzer sat in his office reviewing the Bonz Bagley case in his mind. His office in the old Municipal Police Building just off the northeast side of the courthouse square was one of the smaller ones. The air conditioning was erratic. The thermostat was located someplace outside his office that he had been unable to find so that he usually left the window open to get at least a little air circulating in the room. The summer evening was hot and he sat jacketless, tie loosened with his feet propped on the desk staring out the window at the courthouse across the square and trying his best to imagine that a cool breeze was wafting through the window. But his imagination wasn’t that good. His brain circuits seemed to be hard-wired to reality. Katya Karpov would have classified him as a left-brain person.

  They had scoured the entire area around Printers Alley immediately after the crime scene was secured and the routine procedures were underway. For some reason, Seltzer was fixed on conversations with two teenage boys who had been hanging out on the corner of Fourth and Union that Sunday morning. According to Shane Hadley, the person he saw running from the alley right after the shooting, the poorly described person in the dark blue hoodie, had run to Union and turned left toward Fourth. It was only half a block to the corner. The two young men said they had been standing there for some time, so they must have been there when the fleeing suspect passed. But they swore that they hadn’t seen him. No one running or appearing to be in a hurry. Certainly no one in a hoodie. Not in the heat. They would have noticed that. Then Hardy’s men had found a dark blue hoodie in a garbage can just at the corner of the alley and Union. So this guy had shed the hoodie and presumably walked casually up Union trying, apparently with surprising success, not to attract attention. But the two potential witnesses hadn’t seen him. They couldn’t remember a single man passing by where they stood. Puzzling. The guy just disappeared into thin air. Seltzer hated being confronted with a physical impossibility. He liked his possibilities tethered firmly to realities that he could understand.

  He stood up and paced about the small room. He wanted a cigarette but stifled the urge. He was trying to quit again but it got harder every time he tried. He thought it should get easier with practice but it didn’t. He’d had a lot of practice.

  He thought of Shane Hadley. The real Shane Hadley not the Sherlock Shane of myth. Seltzer thought how hard it must be to be suddenly incapacitated like that. Especially hard for a cop. Inactivity was the bane of a cop’s existence. Stakeouts. Everybody hated stakeouts. The long hours of inactivity. But to be permanently immobilized all of a sudden by a stray bullet finding a home in a critical area of one’s spine? And Hardy Seltzer was painfully aware of the fact that the potential of sharing Shane Hadley’s fate was lurking out there in every cop’s future. Including his own. He didn’t like those thoughts. But they were unavoidable and probably necessary. Once a cop quit thinking about the possibility of catching a bullet, stray or otherwise, the possibility of sharing Shane Hadley’s fate increased. The worst thing a cop could do was to stop paying attention.

  Then there was the other curious thing about the Bonz Printers Alley case. The gun. Or at least what could be told about the gun from the single slug recovered from the dog, no doubt identical to those that the coroner would retrieve from Bonz’s body later. According to the ballistics person pulling weekend duty, a quick run through the ATF’s National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (usually referred to by the acronym NIBIN) indicated that the bullet was probably a .38 Rimless Smokeless, no longer available except on the collector’s market. Of course they had no gun, but the most likely model was also a collector’s item, a Colt Hammer model 1903. That was a best guess of course. The only bullets in the NIBIN database were from committed crimes. The only bullet similar to this one in NIBIN was from a murder committed in Boston by Nicola Sacco in the twenties. According to what Hardy could find on the Internet, the Sacco-Vanzetti case was notorious at the time and the unusual bullets tying Sacco to the murder had been the most convincing evidence. It would be interesting if the same ballistics solved this case, an ironic contribution of Nicola Sacco’s legacy to the cause of criminal justice.

  Seltzer thought about that. The perp couldn’t have been a regular criminal type or if so he was an especially arrogant one. From what Seltzer learned from the Internet, this kind of gun could run several thousand dollars. There was even a limited edition version on sale for over a hundred grand. No regular street criminal would have such a weapon. And why use a gun like that even if you had one? Using such an unusual weapon should make the cops’ job easier. Any halfway savvy street crook would know that. But, on the other hand, what would a rich gun collector be doing in the alley and why would he want to murder Bonz Bagley at all, much less with a weapon that would surely be easy enough to trace? It made no sense. But it did fit with the wad of hundreds left in Bonz’s pocket. Whoever did it didn’t need the money.

  Seltzer started packing up his stuff to go. It was nearly midnight. It had been a long day. He closed the office window and slipped on his jacket even though he had sweated through his shirt. Force of habit.

  “Sunday midnight and I’m just now heading home,” he muttered to himself, “Helluva job.”

  As he found his way to the aging black LTD assigned to him by the department in the parking garage on a lower level of police headquarters, Seltzer thought again of Shane Hadley, how cold his hand felt and how helpless he looked. Seltzer thought if, God forbid, he took a bullet to his spine he would be inclined to eat his gun. He couldn’t imagine living like that.

  But Hardy Seltzer lived alone. He didn’t live with Katya Karpov.

  Chapter 3

  Cyrus Demetrio Bartalak paced the floor of his office waiting for Katya Karpov to arrive for their regular Monday morning meeting. He was anxious about the meeting, more anxious than he thought he should be. He’d read about the murder in Printers Alley in the morning Tennessean and, although he didn’t understand why, he knew that Katya lived there with that paralyzed policeman. There were a lot of things about Katya that Cy didn’t understand. Why live downtown in that seedy alley? And what was the attraction of the paralyzed ex-cop? Cy had met him socially a couple of times and he just didn’t get the attraction. Not for Katya. My God, she could have practically any man she chose. A real man with two good legs and all his other parts in good working order was what she needed.

  Cy had moved from the oppressive confines of the little office off his suite of laboratories to the posh office with the polished brass, “Chairman, Department of Psychiatry,” plaque on the door when he was elevated to that role. He was especially proud of the office. He looked around the room, admiring the antique Persian rug and his hand-picked original art that decorated the walls. This was the kind of office he was destined for, he thought. Trappings worthy of his talents. Spartan offices, typical of the academic hair shirt mentality, were fine for most of the faculty. But not for Cy Bartalak.

  To at least give lip service to any appearance of conflict of interest, Cy had made sure that there was appropriate oversight of the studies of his drug, but he personally kept close tabs on the study’s progress. He knew that the aging proprietor of a downtown bar was one of the subjects who had an especially gratifying response. Beth had told him that. He made the connection when he read the newspaper story and realized that he wasn’t the only person who would make that connection. That worried him. The viability of
the biotech startup company that Cy had launched, leveraging the department’s investment, depended on the drug. And the viability of the drug depended on those studies. He had already put out some feelers to a group of West Coast venture capitalists, and anything that troubled the waters could queer any possible deal. Several million dollars might be riding on that.

  Cy remembered that Katya had voiced some doubt about the effects of the drug, especially in the now-dead subject. At least there wouldn’t be any more follow up tests on that subject. And the data they had on him were solid. But Cy feared that Katya would keep prying into the data. He wasn’t sure why she would want to do that, but he knew her well enough to suspect that she would. The study was essentially done. The conclusions were solid. Let it be. Cy had learned early in his career that you never ask questions if you don’t want to know the answers. But Katya Karpov was cast from a very different mold than Cyrus Bartalak. Her curiosity was not confined to what was likely to serve her own ends. She really wanted to know the truth. Cy respected Katya’s brilliance, but he thought her hopelessly naive. He thought that perceptions were truth. And he was a master manipulator of perceptions. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be where he was.

  As Katya made her way from the parking deck to Bartalak’s office, she thought about Bonz Bagley and the drug trial. And about Beth Bartalak, Cy’s wife. Katya didn’t like Beth, and the feeling was entirely mutual. Beth was a biostatistician who had worked in Cy’s lab before she became his second wife. The details of that transition in her status were never discussed. Apparently there was some unpleasantness involved. It happened before Cy moved his operation from Houston to the medical center in Nashville. They came as a package, and Beth managed the data from the tests performed as part of the drug trial. Since Cy’s elevation to a major administrative role, Beth’s power and authority in the laboratory had increased. She had essentially taken over, and she ruled the lab with an iron hand. She believed that she owned the data, regardless of their sources or who else was involved in collecting them. Beth was especially difficult with Katya. Katya wasn’t sure why, although she suspected that it had something to do with how plain women commonly reacted to her. Katya thought that her physical attributes were often a mixed blessing, too important to members of both sexes….for different reasons.