“I’m trying to approach this thing from every angle, and I was wondering whether there might be any connection to me. You know what I mean?”
“I’m getting this feeling of déjà vu,” Houston replied. “We already had that conversation. Yesterday at the Ritz.”
Barnes recalled nothing about that. “Humor me. What if whoever killed Elizabeth really wanted to kill me instead?”
He took another drag on his cigarette. “Then they really fucked up. You weren’t even in the same country.”
“Yeah, but not everybody knew I was going to that conference. It’s possible that someone was after me instead of her.”
“Anything’s possible.” Denny flicked his cigarette over an ashtray balanced on his thigh.
“You haven’t had something happen to you, have you?”
“What do you mean?” Houston looked at the clock on the wall.
“I mean nobody’s tried to kill you, have they?”
“Other than the usual maniacs on Storrow Drive?” He paused, as if debating whether to mention something, then added, “I doubt it, but somebody did try to break into my house.”
“You’re kidding.” Barnes almost dropped his pen. “When did that happen?” He wrote down the information.
“Thanksgiving night. Around one in the morning. They cut a hole in my dining-room window and set off the alarm. Maybe they wanted what was left of my turkey.”
Barnes scribbled more notes. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this already. I assume the police came.”
“Damn right they came.”
“And?”
“And what? They didn’t find squat. No fingerprints or fibers or whatever the hell else they look for. The police are useless. You remember last summer when some lowlife broke into my car? He left fingerprints all over the outside door and one of the windows, but the cops said they wouldn’t be able to arrest anyone because the fingerprints have to be on the inside.”
Barnes shuffled through his notes. “The Boston police never mentioned anything to me about this. I would definitely have written that down. I write down everything that’s important.”
“Maybe they don’t tell you everything they do, especially when it makes them look like they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.”
“More likely they didn’t know about it. You live in Weston, and all you reported was a robbery. The Weston police probably never informed the Boston police. It’s not only a different department but a different city.”
Houston flicked ashes off his cigarette. “I don’t know, buddy. That’s pretty basic police work. If they couldn’t put together something that obvious, nobody’s ever going to figure out what happened.”
“Why didn’t you tell the Boston police?”
“Look, I did tell the police. If they don’t know in Boston, they’re morons. Besides, I didn’t know what happened to your house at the time.”
“I can’t believe this. Weren’t you worried that somebody might be trying to kill you?”
Houston waved that off. “Not hardly. First they’d have to get past my Glock.”
“Glock?”
“Yeah, my 9mm.” Houston held up his hand like a gun. “On the streets they’re called ‘cop killers.’ If it’s good enough to kill cops, it’s good enough to kill any idiot who comes at me.”
Barnes had no idea Denny owned a handgun. It had never come up in conversation. He added the information to his notes.
Houston continued. “They hold seventeen rounds, and you can kill a whole roomful of people even if you can’t aim worth a damn. So to answer your question, nobody scares me.”
“I guess that doesn’t surprise me.” Barnes looked through his list and saw a question mark next to their research. “Where are we with the Jarrell Pharmaceuticals study? Is that on hold?”
Houston shook his head. “No, it’s not on hold. It’s done.”
“Done? You finished it?”
“Yeah. That’s what done means.”
“How’s that possible? At the rate we were going, we were months away from completing that.”
“I work faster without you.”
“Less carefully . . . You didn’t file the patent yet, did you?”
Houston shifted, and he had to put a hand on the ashtray to keep it from sliding off his thigh. “As a matter of fact, I did.”
Barnes suddenly realized why Houston appeared uncomfortable. “I’m not on it, am I?”
Houston avoided eye contact and took a drag on his cigarette. “We can change it. It’s no big deal.”
“No big deal?” Barnes felt his face flush. “It’s a huge deal. I can’t believe you did that. We are going to change it.”
“Of course we are. Look, buddy, I’m sorry. It’s easy to correct. I’ll do it this week.”
“You’ll do it now.”
“Now’s not really possible. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
Although Barnes wanted it corrected immediately, one day wouldn’t make any difference. “Fine.” He jotted a note to himself. “Tell me something, Denny. How’d you pull it off so fast?”
“We only needed two more patients,” he said. “Found one, and used Reston for the other.”
Barnes wrote that down, too. “William Reston, the AIDS patient?”
“You may recall we did a triple on him.”
“I recall he was a protocol violation. He shouldn’t have been included.”
“Well, he was, and the statistics are clean. We’ll get the patent—both US and international.”
Denny was leaving something out. He wouldn’t have used Reston except as a last resort. “What was so urgent that you had to enroll a patient who didn’t meet the eligibility criteria?” Barnes asked.
“Nothing was urgent.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Denny. Why were you in such a hurry to apply for the patent?” Then he realized—Houston must have sent off the preliminary results for publication. If the patent application wasn’t filed before the publication came out, the information would be considered public domain, meaning they would lose the right to apply for the patent. “You went and wrote a paper, didn’t you?”
Houston snuffed out his cigarette. “No, it was just an abstract. For the San Francisco conference.”
“Son of a bitch. Am I even on it?”
“Course you’re on it,” Houston replied. “I’d have put you first, but you’d have had to present it, and at the time, you were in a coma.”
“That’s just great, Denny. You cut corners and slap everything together while I’m in a coma.”
“Bullshit. I finished a project that needed to get done. That’s all. If you’d had your way, we’d be working on it through half of next year.”
“I’m going to check everything in the analysis,” said Barnes, “and if it isn’t a hundred percent accurate, we’re retracting it.”
Houston regarded him coolly. “You do that, buddy. It’s all legit.”
Barnes stood up. “We’ll see about that.”
Chapter 33
From the surgeons’ lounge, Barnes went straight to Houston’s office. First he had to get past Marcie, Denny’s secretary. A bespectacled woman of about fifty, she sat behind a large desk and looked up passively at Barnes.
“I need to see all the files on the Jarrell Pharmaceuticals project,” he said to her.
“Well, hello, Dr. Barnes. Welcome back.” She smiled pleasantly. “I just received a call from Dr. Houston. He instructed me to make copies of that file by the end of work today. I’ll have it on your desk first thing in the morning.”
Barnes didn’t want to wait until morning. “That’s my study,” he said. “I’m the principal investigator. I should have access to the data immediately, not tomorrow.”
“I understand, Dr. Barnes. Dr. Houston hasn’t given me the file yet. I can’t give you something I don’t have, but I assure you I’ll provide you with a copy, a complete copy, by tomorrow morning.”
“It better be co
mplete,” he said. “And I expect a revised copy of the patent application, too. By eight a.m. tomorrow.” He took out his list and jotted a note. “Otherwise both of you are going to wish you never knew me.”
Leaving Marcie, Barnes headed to his own office down the hall. Even though he’d been gone for weeks, he knew that his secretary, Kristine, would still be at her desk. Like Marcie, she was old school. Some of the other surgeons liked to hire younger secretaries—office candy—but Barnes and Houston knew the folly of that. An inexperienced secretary or office manager can turn a ten-hour day into a fourteen-hour day. Kristine had more than twenty years of experience, and Barnes could trust her to keep on top of things, even under the current circumstances. He knew, without asking, that she’d canceled everything noncritical and had rescheduled or reassigned everything else.
As he walked past her desk on the way into his office, she looked up. “Dr. Barnes!” A genuine smile lit her face. “Welcome back.”
“Thanks.” He kept walking into his office.
She jumped up and followed. “At your convenience I can fill you in on everything that happened in your absence.”
“Tomorrow.” He took out his list. “Also tomorrow make sure I get all the Jarrell Pharmaceuticals files from Houston, including a revision of the patent. Call Marcie if they’re not on my desk by eight a.m.”
“Yes, Dr. Barnes. Anything else?”
“No, that’s it. Thanks. Please close the door on your way out.”
She left him alone, and he settled into the armchair behind his desk. The supple leather, molded to his contour from the countless hours he’d sat on it, seemed to embrace him. In front of him, stacks of papers, journals, and notebooks cluttered a seventy-two-inch mahogany desk, hiding much of the dark surface. In contrast to the clutter, the rest of the office appeared well organized. Signed lithographs of harbor scenes adorned two walls, and behind his desk more than a dozen framed certificates displayed his credentials, including training at Harvard and Mass General, specialty certifications, and certificates from memberships and fellowships in professional societies.
From his desk, he phoned Shirley Collins. His other calls—administrators, colleagues, and everyone from stockbrokers to headhunters—could wait. If anything had been urgent, Kristine would have told him.
Shirley wasn’t in. The departmental secretary told Barnes she was teaching a class across the street. He walked over there, to the main building of the college of medicine. Cracking open the side door to the auditorium, he saw her finishing a lecture to the second-year medical students. More than a hundred of them scribbled notes as she made her concluding remarks.
“. . . and remember, osteoclasts, which break down bone, are of monocyte lineage, meaning they’re derived from the immune system. That’s likely to be on your test.” She noticed Barnes at the door and smiled, then turned back to the class. “If you have any questions, feel free to come up here now or stop by my office later.”
In an instant a drove of students surrounded the podium. Shirley was obviously a popular instructor; after lectures, medical students usually bolted from the auditorium.
The crowd dispersed in a few minutes, and she collected her notes. Barnes walked over. Her hair was shorter than he remembered from October, and she looked more confident, more energetic.
She held out her arms and hugged him. “It’s good to see you, Chris.”
“I was in the neighborhood. Just finished assisting on a bypass.” He hoped she wouldn’t ask for details. What he recalled was so vague it could have been a figment of his imagination.
“Congratulations. I have to admit I was concerned that some administrator there might try to prevent that.”
“Assisting in a surgery? Not a chance. Residents with minimal training assist in major surgeries every day. Those with more training act as chief surgeons on a regular basis, usually when patients don’t have insurance.”
“Is that really true?”
“It is. And I can tell you that even if I can’t remember what I’m doing, I’m still the best cardiothoracic surgeon in the state, if not the entire country.”
“I don’t doubt that.”
“So . . .” He looked at his notes. “. . . are we having dinner tonight?”
She smiled and showed her dimples. “Are you asking me because you’d like to or because your notes say you should?”
“Both,” he decided. “I have to trust my notes.”
“I actually got a call from Richard asking me to reschedule after he stood me up last night. He wants to go out tonight.”
Barnes didn’t know who that was, but he didn’t see the point in asking. “So are you turning me down, or are you double-booking him and me?”
“Neither. I told him maybe. He’s my backup in case you change your mind.”
“I won’t do that. It’s in my notes.”
“All right, then.”
“So you’ll call me later?”
She closed her folder of lecture notes and took his arm. “I will. Friendship always trumps a blind date.”
Maybe for Elizabeth’s friends, he thought. Not for his.
“Please make a note in your list that we’re confirmed,” she said. “I don’t want to cancel Richard and then have you cancel me.”
He wrote confirmed on his list. “Done.”
“Okay, then. We’re all set.”
He wished everything could be that simple.
As if reading his mind, she said, “You’re going to be all right, Chris.”
“I know.” But he didn’t believe it. Things might get better, but they would never be all right.
Chapter 34
Shirley went to her office to prepare another lecture, and Barnes left her to go to the medical library. There he reviewed his notes on Elizabeth’s murder, including the portion of the letter he’d transcribed, the one without a second page. Something about the letter struck him as odd. The tone? The wording? He read the transcription again. Something wasn’t right. It was like a painting with a skewed perspective. Yet the nature of the problem eluded him.
He set the letter aside and reorganized the rest of his notes into a concise outline. Elizabeth would have been proud. She was always trying to get him to be more organized. Until the food poisoning, he’d rarely written notes to himself, and he hardly ever filed anything in any logical order. Now circumstances had forced him to do both—to be more like Elizabeth.
These are the facts, he thought. Some person or persons killed Elizabeth along with Rex in the early evening after the security system was turned off. A few hours later someone broke into Denny’s house. If it was the same intruder, and if the break-ins had something to do with the research he and Denny were working on, then why had the killer murdered Elizabeth and the dog? And how had this person gotten past the security system? Elizabeth wasn’t one to keep the alarm off when she spent the night home alone. She could have opened the door for someone she knew, but then why the hole in the window?
Barnes tried to picture Elizabeth’s murderer. Chances were it was someone she knew, possibly the same person who had written the love letter. Maybe it was someone he knew, too, someone from the medical college or the hospital. The fact that the intruder had shot Rex suggested the killer hadn’t come to the house before. Anyone who’d been to the house would have known that Rex wasn’t a threat. His size would intimidate a stranger, but not anyone who knew him.
Another question also nagged at Barnes—if the killer had murdered Elizabeth by mistake, why go on to Houston’s house and try to break in after botching the first job? Why not wait for another opportunity to do it right?
Barnes wrote down every scenario and motive he could think of, but none seemed likely. Something always failed to make sense: the hole in the window or the alarm turned off or Denny’s house being targeted.
Eventually he gave up trying to figure it out, for the time being. He gathered his notes and headed to another library—the Boston Public. A short drive from th
e medical complex, it was a massive structure with a facade that spanned an entire city block. The front entrance consisted of an expanse of cement stairs leading to three enormous arches with four overhanging clusters of serpentine wrought-iron sconces. At the top of the stairs, between huge cement blocks and flanking the entrance, sat two larger-than-life bronze women, green with age. Sculpted by B. L. Pratt in 1911, the young women in flowing robes possessed a grace and grandeur befitting the enormous building. Barnes recalled that the bronze woman on the right, holding a painter’s palette in her left hand and a paintbrush in her right, represented the arts. The other one represented the sciences. In her left hand, she held a bronze crystal ball. Too bad it didn’t offer a glimpse into the future. He could have used that now.
Once inside the library, he found the microfiche section and viewing machines, and he reviewed back issues of the Boston Globe. He searched for anything of substance that a reporter might have uncovered, beginning with the headline story the day after Carmen had happened upon Elizabeth’s body:
PROMINENT SURGEON SLAIN
Dr. Elizabeth Kramer Barnes, an orthopedic surgeon and the wife of cardiothoracic surgeon Christopher Barnes, was found shot to death in their Boston home early yesterday morning. Her body and that of their dog were discovered in the foyer by Carmen Rodriguez, a maid of several months. Both Dr. Barnes and the dog sustained multiple gunshot wounds from a medium-caliber handgun. Police estimate the murder took place the previous evening, but the coroner’s office has not yet released any findings. Police also confirmed evidence of forced entry, although they have not released any details. There was no apparent sign of a struggle, and a motive has not yet been determined.
At the time of the murder, Dr. Christopher Barnes lay comatose in a Toronto hospital, the result of an outbreak of food poisoning. Doctors describe his condition as poor.
The article went on to discuss Elizabeth’s professional and personal background. Barnes moved on to the next one after making a note about the handgun. His list indicated that Denny owned a 9mm handgun, and he wondered what caliber had been used in Elizabeth’s murder.
Dying to Remember Page 17