Deadly Science

by Ken Brigham

  “Apparently,” the chief responded, “Detective Seltzer did not believe the identity of this witness was of sufficient importance to reveal his identity to any of us before this moment.”

  The chief was pissed.

  Hardy said, “That’s correct. I don’t think the fact that the witness was a former police detective matters. He is a private citizen like anyone else. In fact, his observations may be even more reliable than is often the case for witnesses of a crime.”

  “Well,” the DA continued, “maybe. But just be damned sure you don’t let Sherlock Shane get any notions about doing anything beyond telling us what he saw. That doesn’t sound like much help anyway to me. That sonofabitch is nothing but trouble. Never could leave well enough alone. He screwed up the prosecution’s case more than once when he was on the force.”

  The chief said, “But regardless of that, the question we’re here to answer is whether we have enough to bring in Jody Dakota? The case looks pretty strong. What do you think?”

  The DA thought for a minute and then said, “Ballistics. We wait for the ballistics. If Pete Harvey tells us Dakota’s gun did it, we bring in Dakota and go to trial as fast as possible. If Pistol Pete says it’s definitely not the gun, we forget Dakota and look elsewhere.” Turning to speak to Seltzer, he continued. “Is there an elsewhere to look, detective?”

  “Not at the moment, sir,” Hardy answered. “But we’re continuing the investigation and will continue it until we identify the killer.”

  That was all that Seltzer was prepared to tell them about Shane Hadley’s theory. If he said more, he feared that he would be forced to betray its source, which obviously would not sit well with this august audience.

  “A prosecutable case, detective,” the DA said, slamming his fist on the table. “Just bring me a goddam prosecutable case.”

  Cy and Beth Bartalak were huddled in Cy’s office at the university, going over the drug study results for a final time before the lunch meeting with the Renaptix investors. Beth had presented the data the previous morning at their regular meeting with Katya Karpov, but Cy wanted to review everything one last time before his presentation. He was ready to move ahead with his efforts to nail down commitments from the additional investors or industry partnerships or both that would be necessary to take the next major step in developing the drug. Cy was convinced that they had the ammunition to accomplish that and was excited about the possibilities.

  The first three month follow up studies had been completed on four subjects with moderate to severe Alzheimer’s disease. As with subject number one, two of the subjects showed marked improvements in cognitive function and in the biochemical tests; two showed no real change. And, the coup de grace was that the six-month studies from subject number one indicated that his early marked improvement was sustained. The code was still not broken, but Cy was convinced that the subjects who had improved must be the ones taking the active drug and that the ones who were unchanged must have received placebo. He was pondering whether to go to the DSMB with the data and suggest that they break the code and move on to design the phase three studies. Phase three studies are expensive but with such promising preliminary data, there should be plenty of VCs and major pharmaceutical companies who would be anxious to take the risk given the exorbitant rewards that would come if those studies confirmed Cy’s suspicion that he had discovered the first effective treatment for the five million Americans who suffered from this devastating disease. The angels should be pleased. The value of their investment would skyrocket. Renaptix, Inc. was poised for entry into the heady world of the big-time drug business.

  After going over all of the information and reviewing the few PowerPoint slides that Cy had made, he said, “Beth, Katya came to see me yesterday afternoon. She keeps harping on her suspicion that there is something funny about the data on subject number one. I’m getting a little worried about her.”

  “Like I said earlier, Cy,” Beth responded. “That woman has to go. Everybody knows she doesn’t like me. She’s likely to do anything she can to discredit me. But I’m surprised that she came to you about it.”

  “Well, I am her chairman.”

  “Yes, but she’s aware that you have other loyalties,” Beth said. “I doubt that she thinks that you would conspire against your own wife.”

  “She’s not that stupid.”

  Beth replied, “She’s certainly not stupid, but for some reason that I don’t understand, she seems to have this desperate need to do me in. She surely knows that you won’t let that happen.”

  Cy opened the drawer to his desk and withdrew a folder, placed it on his desk and slid it across to Beth.

  “Katya gave me this file,” he said. “I haven’t looked at it, but she claims that it contains information that raises questions about the results of some of the drug studies. Can you have a look at it and let me know if there’s anything there that should concern me?”

  “Where did this supposed incriminating information come from?”

  “She allegedly retrieved it from your computer in the lab,” Cy said.

  “Isn’t that illegal?” Beth said. “Isn’t the fact that she admits to breaking into my computer grounds for getting rid of her once and for all? She is nothing but trouble, Cy.”

  “Well, maybe,” he responded. “Maybe. But have a look at the file, and if there’s anything in it that I need to know, tell me.”

  “If not?”

  “If not, then I suggest that you destroy the material.”

  “I can do that,” Beth said. “But the stuff will still be in her computer. And she probably made hard copies for herself as well, don’t you think? If this is something she has contrived to get at me, she surely wouldn’t have given her only copy to you.”

  “That’s very likely,” Cy answered. “But it will be of no use to her.”

  “No use? Suppose she goes over your head with this. Like I said, she seems desperate.”

  “She won’t do that,” Cy said with his familiar air of confidence. “That would be professional suicide and, if my knowledge of the human psyche tells me anything, it is that Katya Karpov is not suicidal.”

  Beth responded, “Too bad.”

  Beth was troubled by this turn of events. It had been careless of her to leave her computer open when she wasn’t there. And she should have destroyed all of the raw data that didn’t fit with her official records much earlier than she did. She shouldn’t have left it on her computer at all. That was not like her. Beth was ordinarily a meticulous person. It was attention to detail that made her so good at her job. And it was her brilliance as a biostatistician that had first attracted Cy’s attention when she had been just another member of his lab group in Houston. It was meticulous planning that had made it possible to lure Cy away from his wife of many years, a carefully conceived and boldly executed plan that brought them to this point. This was no time to get careless.

  Cy did wonder what was in the file that Katya Karpov had given him, but decided that it was not in his best interest to read it. Never ask questions the answers to which you don’t want to know was one of the dicta that he lived by; it had served him well. He had the information he needed and was prepared to act on it.

  Beth had seemed concerned, maybe even troubled, when he presented her with the file. As he thought about it, Cy had noticed some unusual behavior in his wife recently. She was spending less time at work than had been her habit. She had always been an avid runner, but what had been a harmless habit seemed lately more like an addiction. If she had left her computer accessible to Katya, that was careless, and the Beth he knew was not a careless person. What he liked about his wife was that she was loyal, careful and dependable, there when he needed her and not in his way when he didn’t. She didn’t require a lot of care and feeding and he liked that. Care and feeding of other people were not activities that Cy relished and he didn’t do them very well without a compelling ulterior motive. He had plenty to do without having to trouble himself about B
eth. After all, he hadn’t taken her on as a professional project. He had married her, for God’s sake. But, maybe he should start paying more attention to Beth’s behavior. He could tell if there was something wrong….if he paid attention.

  Chapter 18

  Lawrence Walker, the chairman of the university psychiatry department before Cyrus Bartalak ascended to that role, had been Katya Karpov’s mentor for several years. He viewed her as a rising star. He even thought that she might follow him as chairman in a few years in spite of the fact that naming a neurologist to that role in a department of psychiatry would have been a distinctly unusual move. But Walker thought that such a bold appointment would have been justified by Katya’s brilliance and her integrity, an increasingly rare characteristic of the new generation of overly ambitious opportunists who seemed to be gaining control of universities. Walker was a gentleman of the old school.

  Walker had recruited Bartalak and his drug development group from Houston at the urging of the dean. Bartalak was wildly successful at attracting federal grant money. He brought several million dollars in grants to the university when he came and had competed successfully for several additional millions after the move. Walker didn’t suspect that what actually attracted Bartalak, what sealed the deal, was the promise from the dean that he would be Walker’s successor. When movement in that direction seemed to be too slow to suit Bartalak, he approached the dean with the threat to explore the numerous offers he regularly received from other institutions unless the dean made good on his promise. The result was that the elegant and distinguished psychiatrist, Lawrence Walker, was eased into early retirement. A faculty committee working at lightning speed with a headhunter firm handpicked by the dean concluded after an extensive national search that Cyrus Bartalak was the perfect candidate, a conclusion that the majority of the cynically inclined medical faculty believed to have been patently foregone. Bartalak was appointed to the chair, an event announced in an elaborate press release and celebrated by an extravagant reception hosted by the dean in the main dining room at the University Club.

  On his first day in his new role, Bartalak gave notice to virtually every member of the department that he would be replacing them with people of his own choosing—he cleaned house. Except for Dr. Karpov. That surprised both Katya and most of the other faculty since she had been a special favorite of the previous chairman. However, she was also the only real rising star that Bartalak inherited, so it made sense as an academic move. It was one of the few things that Bartalak did that gained him some grudging admiration from his colleagues in the other departments. Some suspected that keeping Katya was a condition imposed by the dean for Bartalak’s promotion. But no one, including Katya, knew for sure if that was true.

  Katya agreed to stay on in spite of her better judgment and it came with a price. Bartalak made it clear that she was to do his bidding, and he gave her considerably less freedom to pursue her own interests than was true earlier. That and the necessity to work in the same laboratory with the chairman’s wife whom Katya disliked and didn’t trust made her job considerably less pleasant and less interesting under Bartalak’s leadership than she had hoped it would be . Katya often thought that she should have looked for employment elsewhere, and she might still do that. She was certain that if she put out the word that she was in the market, there would be opportunities. But she liked her lifestyle in Nashville with Shane and didn’t relish the thought of uprooting them. She had tried to make the best of the situation. That effort, she was coming to realize, was probably futile.

  Those were Katya’s thoughts as she took the stairs down a flight from her office on the fifth floor and approached the door to the pathology laboratory. She didn’t have an appointment with Sydney Shelling, but the neuropathologist was always available to her when she needed to talk. Syd was the nearest thing she had at work to a confidante. They had been colleagues for several years, and Shelling was one of the most respected members of the medical faculty. He was certainly the one person she most trusted to be honest, genuinely concerned and discreet. She valued his advice even when she chose not to follow it. Had she followed his earlier advice when her department chairmanship changed, she would be elsewhere now and no doubt better off.

  “Hi, Syd,” Katya said.

  He sat at a workbench in his habitual pose, hunched over a microscope peering at intently at the greatly magnified details of a very small piece of a human brain.

  “Oh, hi Katya,” he answered, turning to face her. “Come in and have a seat.”

  “Looks like you’re busy, Syd,” Katya said. “I can come back later if you like.”

  Syd was always busy and she knew that, but she also knew that he was rarely too busy to interrupt what he was doing to talk with her.

  “I was just puzzling over this slide,” Syd responded. “Never saw anything like it before. I’ve seen a lot of hippocampi in my time, but never one like this.”

  “Really?” she said, “What is it?”

  “The coroner sent over some sections from the brain of a poor guy who got himself shot in the head,” Shelling answered. “Multiple shots directly into the brain. Most of the cerebral hemispheres were essentially mush, but the hippocampus on the left side was still intact. And these sections through the hippocampus are particularly interesting. Here,” he continued, “let me put this on the teaching scope and I’ll show you what I mean.”

  He removed the slide from his scope, moved to the other side of the bench, and inserted the slide under a microscope with a single stage but with multiple binocular viewing ports. The scope was used as a teaching device so that several students could view the same section as the instructor as he described it for them. Katya took a seat at one of the viewing ports.

  “What I find strange,” Shelling said, “are these vacuoles,” using the pointer that could be moved around to identify the area he was describing, “and here,” moving the pointer again. “Some of the cells have these inclusions that aren’t typical of anything that I can think of. They aren’t at all like viral inclusions. Maybe more like toxic granules of some sort.”

  Katya knew a lot about normal brain anatomy, but she wasn’t an expert pathologist. She accepted Syd’s opinion at face value.

  “Did the guy have Alzheimer’s?” she asked. “That might explain abnormalities in the hippocampus. But this doesn’t really look like that, does it? So what do you think it is?”

  “There are some Alzheimer’s like changes, but like you say, these vacuoles and inclusions are different. My best guess at this point is that it’s some kind of toxic reaction. Maybe something the person was exposed to, some environmental toxin. Or a strange reaction to a drug. I’ll need to get more details from the coroner about the possibilities.”

  “Was this a recent case?” Katya asked.

  “Yes, pretty recent. A murder case that’s apparently still being investigated.”

  Katya thought. A recent murder case. Multiple shots to the head.

  “Does the victim have a name?” she asked.

  “I’m sure he must, Katya,” Syd answered. “But the coroner just gave me the number he had assigned to the case. Like I said, I’ll need to get more information. I just got the sections this morning.”

  Damn! Katya thought. What if this is what’s left of Bonz Bagley’s brain? Drug toxicity? Damn! It would fit with her suspicions about the clinical and biochemical tests. Cy’s drug could be killing people. If this were true, her options were suddenly diminished. She considered revealing the identity of subject number one in the drug study to the pathologist, but knew she was not authorized to do that. If this was the brain of that subject, everyone would know soon.

  “You look surprised, Katya, anything wrong?”

  “Can we talk?” Katya replied.

  “Sure,” Shelling responded, rising from his chair; sensing that his might be something serious, he continued. “Shall we go into my office?”

  Shelling’s office was adjacent to the laboratory. His sta
ndard-issue office furniture was unremarkable. The faux wood top of the black steel desk was piled high with charts, journals and books. The computer screen on the credenza behind the desk was virtually obliterated by yellow sticky notes. Syd removed a stack of journals from a chair and motioned her to sit. He sat down behind the desk.

  “You’d think the computer age’s magic wand would make all this paper disappear,” Syd said. “But it just seems to get worse.”

  “Going paperless takes a lot of paper,” Katya replied.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Like wires and wireless. The computer age is full of oxymorons.”

  “Isn’t all of life?”

  “That, too. That, too,” Syd repeated, then said, “So what’s troubling that brilliant mind of yours, Katya Karpov?”

  Katya confided the entire story. She included the evidence of Beth Bartalak’s scientific misconduct that she had purloined from Beth’s computer and the fact that she had revealed her suspicions and the evidence to Bartalak. She asked if Shelling thought she should lodge a formal complaint with the dean or whether he thought there was some other course that was wiser.

  “Wiser?” he mused. “Well, I’m not sure about that. This is a difficult dilemma. It’s no secret that you and Beth Bartalak don’t get along. And Cy doesn’t appreciate having anything about his operation questioned. We’re all painfully aware of that. He’s also a creature of the dean. It could look like you’re just out to get at Beth rather than being concerned about the integrity of the science.”

  “But I do have some evidence to support the suspicion.”

  “But you obtained it illegally. Not such a good idea, Katya. It would’ve been better to lodge the formal complaint and let the investigating committee retrieve the data from Beth’s computer. Unauthorized access to a colleague’s computer is not a violation that is likely to be taken lightly.”