by Jamie Metzl
“Get out of my way, sir,” the officer commands with only the slightest hint of politeness, making clear that brute force is the next step if I don’t get out of his way. “I’m not going to tell you again.”
“What the hell is going on here?” Maurice demands as he walks toward us from the door.
“This gentleman is impeding my way,” the officer says, turning toward Maurice. “He told me I need to call you before putting the canine in my car.”
“This ‘gentleman’ doesn’t have the authority here to take a piss,” Maurice says. “Proceed.”
“Wait,” I say, still not moving from between the officer and his car. “What are you going to do with this dog? Interrogate him?”
“We’re going to put him in the department’s canine facility, where he now belongs,” Maurice replies, clearly annoyed he’s explaining this to me at all.
“Just hear me out for one minute, Maurice,” I plead. The images, words, and questions flow through my mind. Toni on the ground petting the delighted Sebastian. Best friends in a past life. Heller telling Toni to care for Sebastian if something should ever happen to him. Did he know this was coming?
Maurice shakes his head. “What?”
“Just let me take him home to Toni. It’ll be a far better home for the dog, and if you need him for any reason, I’ll just bring him to you right away. You know where I live. What are you going to get from the dog, a confession?”
Maurice’s face tightens, then releases slightly. He’s just done me the favor of breaking in. But I’ve done him the favor of finding a body. “What are you gonna use for a leash?”
20
“Baby?” I say, peeking my head through the small crack I’ve opened in Toni’s back door. I’m trying to block the door for a few moments but feel the pull on the string I’m holding in my outside hand.
“What happened?” she asks, responding to the look of concern on my face from her perch beside the kitchen table.
I feel the dog squirming around my leg and through the crack, then let go of the string.
A look of unbridled joy crosses Toni’s face as Sebastian approaches, only to vanish just as quickly. “Why is he here?”
I don’t respond.
Sebastian jumps up on her lap, pushing his snout into the space between her arm and her chest. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she says lovingly, rubbing his head. “He’s shaking. What happened?”
I get on my knees before her and tell the story.
Toni’s eyes begin to tear.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
Toni is an intensive care nurse not unexposed to death, but the idea of this vibrant man being consumed by carnivorous jellyfish clearly shakes her. “How could this have possibly happened?”
I place my hand gently on the back of her neck. “Heller said you should take Sebastian if something ever happened to him.”
She looks up at me with wide eyes. “Like he knew it might?”
“It’s hard to believe all of these strange occurrences are random. Hart and Wolfson disappear from their hospices; we make a connection to Heller; and now Heller is dead. We can’t rule out an accident, or suicide, but …”
“He said he had a huge amount of work to do,” Toni says softly, translating her sadness into tenderness toward Sebastian. “He dedicated his life to his research, to the memory of Yael. He had a puppy to take care of. And how could he have possibly fallen into the aquarium through the slit on the top?”
A nervous synapse fires through my brain. If death surrounds this story, where am I heading by following it? What am I doing by bringing it home?
Toni strokes Sebastian’s head. “You poor dear,” she says. “You must be so frightened. You must be starving.”
She carries Sebastian toward the cupboard and takes out two bowls with her free hand. She fills one with water and the other with a turkey burger left over from the freezerator. Then she places Sebastian on the floor. He laps up the water voraciously. Toni kneels beside him.
“I told Maurice we would look after him for now,” I say. “I can’t imagine they’ll need him for anything but he technically belongs to them.”
“Are you okay?” she asks, standing and putting her arms around me. With the quiet tension flowing between us these past months, the gesture almost startles me.
“Thank you,” I say, wrapping my arms around Toni. “I think so.”
“So what now?”
“I need to connect with Jerry, then I need to speak with Martina. Can I borrow your u.D?”
Toni nods, but I sense in her gesture a slight disappointment that I’m ending our brief connection to get back to work. She leans down to comfort the dog.
I pause a moment, then pick up her u.D from the counter and carry it into the dining room.
“Where are we?” I ask as Jerry’s sweaty face pops up on Toni’s table screen.
“I’m in at the first level,” he says. “This is not going to be easy. It’s a compartmentalized ARM server with individual access points and OTP encryption systems guarding each portal.”
“I’m not exactly sure what all that means. Can we get past it?”
“I don’t know yet,” Jerry says, frustrated. “I’m working on it.”
“Thank you, Jerry.”
He doesn’t break his focus on the wall of the screens before him as I tap off.
My boss is harder to reach. It’s now after midnight, and I have to wake her up using the emergency special access code.
“What the fuck, Azadian,” Martina says groggily and without conviction as she comes on screen. The words are rote for her after repeating them for so long, but she probably knows I wouldn’t drag her out of bed for no reason.
As I explain all that’s happened, her face wakens. A dead body of a renowned scientist in a hidden lab in the West Bottoms is just the type of local story the new Kansas City Star is supposed to pursue.
“I want you on this like a fly on shit,” she says.
21
I climb into bed at 1:15 a.m. after filing my story. Toni and I both toss and turn all night. Our few moments of slumber are interrupted by Sebastian yelping and growling in his sleep from the nest he’s built himself in Toni’s clothes hamper. All three of us are a wreck when the bedroom screen activates itself at 7 a.m., but Sebastian approaches the bed, seeming to intuit that if it’s morning some extra attention must be coming his way.
Toni looks over at me. “I think that’s your job.”
“Oh, no,” I say.
“Are you kidding me?” Her look seals my fate. “Use your string as a leash. The plastic bags are under the sink.”
I know where the plastic bags are; I’ve just always been disgusted by watching otherwise civilized humans bending over to grab steaming piles of poo with only the thinnest layer of Price Chopper’s plastic covering their hands. A news feed I saw a few weeks ago of the Japanese robot walking a dog down a sidewalk in Tokyo, poop-removal shovel at the ready, flashes through my mind.
I look at Toni a few moments too long and decide not to mention the robot. I’m the robot. I turn toward Sebastian. “All right, you little fucker, let’s go for a walk.”
The walking part is not as bad as I thought. When Sebastian dives under a bush to do his business, I don’t see anyone around to ask about etiquette but assume leaving it there is probably a fertilizing gift to the bush.
But I’m only faintly focusing on the dog. My mind is filled with theories on how Heller might have died and struggling to get the nauseating image of his half-consumed body out of my head.
I walk in the door after ten minutes outside and see Toni putting the final touches on a small barricaded area in the kitchen with a pile of towels in one corner for a bed.
“It’s the best we can do for now,” she says. “Can you stop by during the day to check on him and take him out?”
“Of course,” I say, still ruminating about Heller. If Heller was murdered, whoever did it is out there somewhere. Is it
only coincidence that this happened after our visit? Are we now on someone’s radar? It’s not just that Martina ordered me. From deep inside, I know I need to be on this story like a fly on shit.
Toni seems to sense my thoughts are elsewhere. “What do you think Heller meant, that we’d come at a serendipitous moment?”
“I’ve been thinking about that and don’t have much of an answer,” I say quietly. “He said he wouldn’t normally be so forthcoming.”
“So why be forthcoming now, why with us?” Toni asks.
“What do you think?”
She bites her bottom lip and folds her wiry arms as she thinks. “He invites us into a place he’d set up to keep people out, says in multiple ways he’s facing danger, then winds up dead later that same day.”
The loud beep of her Haier Breakfast Deluxe machine puts the brakes on my train of thought. I still don’t have an answer but won’t find it in Toni’s kitchen. I grab the omelet sandwich, wrap it in a paper towel, give Toni a quick kiss, and head out the door.
Pulling into the Hospital Hill parking lot of the UMKC Department of Life Sciences, I am hoping that Franklin Chou can help. One of the country’s foremost genetics experts, with a joint appointment in life sciences and the medical school, Chou was introduced to me a couple of years ago by Jerry Weisberg. I haven’t done much to keep up the relationship but we have enough history to justify my showing up unannounced.
The department receptionist tells me he’s not in his office but admits, when I push, that I might be able to locate him in the lab. I find him peering intensely through a scope at a small glass plate.
“Professor Chou?”
His head and tightly cropped black hair do not move as I approach.
“Professor Chou?” I repeat.
“Not now,” he says dismissively, as if speaking to a misbehaving student, still not lifting his head.
“Professor Chou, it’s Rich Azadian.”
“Rich Azadian,” he repeats playfully, twisting a knob slightly to move the plate under his scope. “There must be some serious shit going down.”
I can’t help but chuckle. “I hate to be so predictable.”
He finally lifts his head from the scope and faces me. In his mid-thirties, he seems to compensate for his dimpled, boyish face with his formal bow tie and minimalist top-frame glasses.
“Have you heard of a cancer researcher named Noam Heller?”
“He used to be at Sowers. I haven’t heard anything about him in a few years.”
“He died yesterday.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Chou does not seem moved. “He was old.”
“We found his body in the aquarium in his lab. He was being consumed by carnivorous jellyfish.”
Concern registers across Chou’s face. “So what brings you here?”
“I was hoping to ask you about the science he was working on.”
“Let’s go to my office.”
22
“Here’s what I think,” Chou says after I’ve described the conversation with Heller and all I can remember about his lab. He pauses a moment, then leans forward in his chair. “First, there’s no doubt that genetic mutations and targeted molecules can be used to extend the life spans of individual cells. That work has been around for over a decade. We’ve made steady progress, but everyone keeps hoping for miracles that are probably still decades away, maybe more. It’s one thing to make a roundworm live a few extra weeks, even months, with genetic manipulation, but hand washing has done more to extend the human lifespan across the population than genetic manipulations will do for a long, long time.”
“But—”
“Second, there are lots of ways to hack a mouse. We’ve been breeding the transgenic mice for decades. We’ve starved them and pumped them up with rapamycin, NAD, and this and that, and we’ve definitely produced some longer-living and stronger and maybe even marginally smarter mice.”
I know this from the crash course in genetically enhanced mice I got from US Marshall Anderson Gillespie, the man who saved my life in Norman, Oklahoma, two years ago. “Go on.”
“From what you describe, it sounds like Heller was experimenting with parabiosis on the mice. Tony Wyss-Coray and a few others showed years ago that if you transfused blood between a young and an old mouse, the old mouse would get biologically younger and the young mouse biologically older. But this work has been a lot more complicated in humans. Our systems are so much more complex. Would it be conceptually possible to create some kind of parabiosis-plus, not just transfusing blood but goosing the process with other factors? Could we eventually do some sort of autologous parabiosis-plus, using our own stored cells from before our cells had genetically mutated into cancers? Again, conceptually, yes. Practically, probably not very soon with any degree of efficacy or safety.”
“Okay.”
“Third, you said that Heller’s primary focus was on the reversion of cells to their precancerous state. The idea of somehow using genetic manipulations to revert these types of cells has been around for at least four years. It was actually Noam Heller and a few others who put it forward. I think you know that. This is the first I’ve heard of adding so many other factors to the process. I’ve heard rumors that some of the preliminary experiments on this have worked with mice. A lot of money has gone into testing. The trials are still in the field.”
“Santique?”
“Them and a few others. It’s a race,” Chou says. “This is huge business. If this approach works, and whoever does it first gets the right global patents, it would mean billions of dollars in added revenues.”
“And high stock valuations.”
“That’s not my field,” Chou continues, “but everyone knows the stock prices of the big health companies competing in the great cancer race have been shooting up and that these valuations are what let them keep snapping up the most advanced innovations and treatments coming out of smaller labs and startups.”
“But they can’t all win the race.”
“In life, like in evolutionary biology, there are winners and losers.”
“What can you tell me about the equipment Heller had in his lab? Does it indicate anything?” I ask.
“Tell me about the jellyfish tank,” Chou says.
I do.
“And you said they were deep-sea jellyfish?”
“That’s what he said. From under the Arctic ice.”
“Deep-sea carnivorous jellyfish?”
“That’s what he told us.”
Chou lays his palm on his tabletop monitor then starts dictating commands. “Do you remember the name of the species?”
I wrack my brain but can’t remember.
Chou swipes through images of different types of jellyfish before stopping on one.
“Was it Turritopsis nutricula melanaster?”
“I think so. I remember thinking it sounded like Count Dracula.”
Chou lifts his head in astonishment. “Do you have any idea what it would cost to keep deep-sea Arctic Turritopsis like that alive for any significant period of time?”
“Thousands?”
“Millions,” he says, his eyes glazing as his thoughts deepen. “Maybe more. Creatures at that depth live in a highly pressurized environment. They couldn’t survive in the low-pressure environment of the surface.” He begins doing calculations in his head. “Maintaining that kind of pressure in an artificial environment would mean you’d have over a hundred tons of pressure against the aquarium walls. You’d need extremely powerful pumps to get water in and out.”
I’d been mesmerized by the jellyfish themselves but hadn’t, until now, appreciated how much must have gone into just getting them there and keeping them alive.
Chou digs in. “Tell me exactly how each room was laid out.”
I do.
“Very interesting,” he says. “It sounds like a mix between a high throughput animal bio facility, a stem cell lab, and a cancer ward.”
“What does that tell us?�
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“I don’t know. Life sciences work is very specific. I’d need to see the lab, look at the specimens, note how the equipment is calibrated. If there are still plates in the screening machines, I can bring them back and sequence the DNA from the samples here. That would probably tell us a lot.”
“Can I take you there now?” I say, not sure I can even get Maurice to let me in to the crime scene.
“I wish I could, Rich, but I’m teaching at eleven.”
“Can someone else cover for you? This is pretty important.”
“It’s exam time. I can’t do that to my students. They’ve got a lot riding on it.”
“Are you sure?”
Chou nods apologetically. “Just pick me up here at one,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “Heller’s lab isn’t going anywhere.”
I speak with Jerry from the dashboard screen as my Tesla weaves its way to the Star. He’s been working most of the night trying to break through the internal firewalls in Heller’s network and is still not making much progress. I don’t need to ask whether he’ll keep going. The answer is clear from the weary determination in his eyes.
“What do you have?” Martina demands as I enter the newsroom.
“Well, hello to you, Ms. Hernandez,” I say cheekily. The story I filed on the murder late last night has already been gaining traction, so I’m feeling I have at least some of my bases covered.
“Don’t be a jackass, Jorge.”
“I’m not a jackass, I’m a fly on shit.”
“I’m putting Halley on the story,” she says without emotion.
“What for?” I ask, probably not doing enough to hide my annoyance. First she sends Sierra to the health-care forum I’m already covering and now this? I don’t want to be stupidly territorial but I’ve brought this story from nothing.
“From what you’ve told me, this is now a health-care story. That’s her beat.”
“And potholes are an engineering story, but we don’t send those stories to engineering.”
Martina shakes her head.
I start to wonder if she is somehow getting back at me for my enhanced notoriety or still angry I was offered the editorship, or something even deeper is going on. “And what about the disappearance of Hart and Wolfson?” I argue, my mind focusing simultaneously on Katherine Hart and my future at the Star. Is Martina somehow grooming Sierra to take my place?