by Brian Deer
On the road from Garberville, Trudy planned her first question: the first question mothers ask the police. The lawyer wouldn’t drive one hundred miles for no reason, and it wasn’t as if she lacked imagination. Helen Glinski’s symptoms sounded like an immune system issue. Wilson must have altered her records.
Mr. Hoffman slid across the Sentra’s back seat and another long silence ensued. She heard shoulders rub cotton, fingers tap seat covering, shoes scrape floor, and a bump.
Then her lips shaped a word before she released it into the vehicle: subdued and toneless. “Well?”
Another rub of shirt. More shoes on floor. “Well?” Hoffman mimicked. “Well, what?”
Clouds of apprehension, brewing for hours, now erupted in a terrified rage. “So, it’s you who’s going to tell me then? Is it?”
His reply came softly, as if this meeting was routine: a board subcommittee, or budget session. “What’s it you want to know, Trudy? I can only tell you what I got. It’s not easy, but I’ll tell you what I got.”
“For one thing, I want to know what Doctorjee was doing. What on earth was the research head of a biotech in Georgia doing working as a physician in California?”
More shoes. More shirt. More fingers on seat covering. “Look now, Trudy, first thing we need here is to keep calm. Keep calm. Huh? We gotta. That’s why I drove up here. I want to meet you halfway on this. That’s my one, single, aim in all this.”
“It’s the vaccine, isn’t it? There’s something I don’t know. There’s something being kept from me. Tell me.”
The repertoire of noises from the back seat resumed. “Listen, all they were doing—as I understand it now—was minding everyone’s best interests. That’s all.”
“Best interests? Best interests? Explain that. How can that be?”
“Unconventional? Yes. Excessive? Probably. But you can’t fault Dr. Grahacharya on his professional dedication. Tough for me to admit it, but I gotta admit it, however this thing looks on the surface.”
She tried to twist round to confront the man behind her, but her body wouldn’t obey her will. “That’s plain ridiculous. You don’t fool me. What on earth was he doing out here?”
“Not trying to fool anyone, Trudy.”
“If there was something wrong with that volunteer, you’re saying there’s no physicians in the state of California, no other department at the hospital? What on earth were they doing with her? Why wasn’t she admitted to the hospital?”
She felt Hoffman’s hands grip the back of her seat. “Because, Trudy, she needed looking after. And as I understand it now, Doctorjee and Wilson were best placed to do that.”
“Nonsense. Ludicrous. To my knowledge, Doctorjee’s hardly practiced a day’s clinical medicine in his life. Skipped straight from his residency to his PhD and paper-pushing.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. But I been trying to figure this out, and nothing but this, since last night. And the way I see it, some woman on your trial gets sick with a bunch of weird shit. Right?”
“What on earth do you mean ‘weird shit’?”
“Now how’s that gonna play when it gets all over Frisco? All over America? All over the world? Your trial would be as dead as a skunk on the interstate.”
“What weird shit? What on earth are you talking about? What exactly was wrong with that woman?”
Now she heard the sound of a palm rubbing cheek. “Don’t ask me. I’m only a lawyer.”
“Well, I don’t believe she died of heart disease. It’s incredible there wasn’t an autopsy.”
“I don’t know. Doctorjee says it’s plausible.”
“What do you mean ‘plausible’?”
She felt Hoffman’s fingers drumming her headrest. “I don’t know.”
“You do know. Why else are we meeting in whatever godforsaken place this is? I demand you tell me.”
To her left, Ben’s elbows rested on the steering wheel, with both hands covering his face. Outside, the evening was moving through twilight. Nightfall was minutes away.
Now a slap on her seatback. “Alright, Trudy, I’ll tell you what I got. But you gotta come halfway to meet me here. You gotta tell me—no, you gotta promise me—you won’t go calling up Marcia again. We’ve gotta keep a grip on this thing.”
“Don’t you patronize me. Are you going to tell me what he was doing out here?”
Hoffman brushed the rear seat. “Well, least let’s keep it cool then. Huh? This isn’t easy. And remember, I’m not a scientist.”
She didn’t know for sure what words he’d choose but guessed more or less where they’d lead. On the silent drive south, the possibilities she considered had narrowed and narrowed to a point. Here was the moment when the missing child’s mother was invited to please sit down.
Trudy felt empty. Her rage was passing like Pamlico Sound after a storm. And then she felt more: the purely physical sensation that she needed a bathroom soon.
“Go on,” she said. “We’re waiting.”
“So, how do I put it?” Fingers on cotton. Shoes on flooring. “Doctorjee tells me the mechanism is still speculative. Hypothetical, if you will. But have you heard of, what is it now? Have you heard of ‘deceptive imprinting’?”
“What?”
“Deceptive imprinting.”
Trudy shivered as the words attacked her eardrums. What did she feel now? She felt horror. For the best part of an hour after they left Gennifer Heusch this idea had skirted her thinking. A scientist named Nara was among the first to propose it: that some vaccines might harbor a downside. They might “deceptively imprint”—like a bird to the wrong parent—the wrong type of response to infection. Papers were written and there was fringe talk at conferences. But nobody paid serious attention.
“Nonsense. That’s all hypothetical. We’ve never seen any case of a vaccine doing that kind of harm.”
“No?”
“Well, a respiratory syncytial virus vaccine had an issue once. Dengue, possibly. And an early measles effort. But they were all very different circumstances.”
“Doctorjee says that. He agrees with you there.”
“And that’s what he’s saying about this?”
“He’s saying we don’t know enough. Not by a long shot. He says possibly it’s something to do with macrophages, whatever they are. But I’ve gotta tell you that that’s his best guess, as of today.”
“What, he’s saying the vaccine did that to Helen Glinski? Some type of enhanced disease progression? That’s what he’s saying? I don’t believe it.”
“Says we can’t be sure. But possibly. Probably. I don’t know. Wilson says Helen Glinski’s immune system dropped out of whack soon after she became HIV-positive. She’d gotten her first WernerVac. So, we’re talking the vaccine first, the virus infection second. The two things together. One–two. Wilson figures she probably got infected by the husband. One of his boyfriends got tested at the General, and Wilson says his virus strain was sequenced and more or less exactly matched.”
“I don’t believe you. Even if that’s all true—and I doubt it—you’re saying she got sick that fast? Never heard of such a thing. I don’t believe a word of this.”
“Look, none of us loves Wilson. Meanest man this side of the big river. But he’s got the experience, and he says he’s never seen anything like it. Other things point the same way. Long and short of it is that, from the day Helen Glinski got HIV, she did worse—and we’re talking bad—for having gotten the vaccine beforehand.”
Trudy felt dizzy, breathless, suffocating. “That’s ridiculous. I don’t believe it. I’ve seen her records. You’re saying she had her second inoculation in June, and she died in November. It’s not biologically plausible.”
“Didn’t get the second shot. Wilson switched her to placebo after the first.”
“That’s impossible. How could he? The trial was double-blind. That’s impossible.”
“Not at all. Company knows who’s
on what. All that blind trial shit’s the biggest myth since the virgin birth. Half the volunteers correctly guess what they’ve gotten. We know from manufacturing at Athens which vials have what in them. We know from bloodwork analysis. We know from listening to the data safety monitoring board meetings.”
“You listen to the DSMB?”
“We do what we do.”
She needed a bathroom. But she needed answers more. Now they’d started, she wanted it all. “So, you’re saying she got one shot of vaccine, was then exposed to HIV, and was dead in less than a year?”
“That’s about the size of it. Doctorjee figured it best you didn’t know, what with your condition. He was thinking of you. He’s a considerate man in some ways.”
“No, no, no. No. We never saw anything like this in the data. There was nothing. Something like this would show. And surely there would be others. Are you saying there’s others?”
“No, there aren’t others… Well, in point of fact there is one other. In Boston. He’s not doing bad though. He’ll be okay… Oh, and there’s another guy in Florida with something extremely minor, of a related nature. On an enrollment of nearly twenty-seven thousand.”
“So, there are three? And what about treatment? Why didn’t she receive anti-retroviral therapy? And, even if it’s true what he’s saying, no enhanced progression would have killed her in that way. Not that fast, in any possibility. Her sister said nothing about any pathognomonic symptoms, like pneumonia or Kaposi’s sarcoma. And nothing like this could lead to cardiomyopathy and heart failure.”
Now she heard a ferocious rubbing in the back. “That right? I see. I don’t have all the details. Only got most of this last night and today. Still trying to take it in myself. I don’t know why he put that on the certificate. There were concerns to protect your vaccine, I know that.”
Trudy fumbled with the door lever but moved too late. She felt a warm sensation between her legs.
Hoffman slapped the driver’s seat. “Ben, why not go sit in my car for ten minutes? And make sure your phone stays off.”
Forty
HE GRIPPED the wheel of the Chevy Camaro and stared, barely focusing, at the Bottle Shop. In the last forty-eight hours, he’d hardly slept three continuously. And those were stewed in beer or cocaine. His brain felt numb: trampled by buffalo. His shoulders felt set in wet sand.
What the fuck was going down here? “Enhanced progression?” Helen Glinski got sick because of the vaccine? The Marketing Department had no brochure on this. No video panel flashed from module B.
In the Sentra, to his right, Doc Mayr rubbed her eyes and pressed a cigarette to her lips.
At least he’d found a discrete location. After a woman pulled away in an Acura ILX, the lot was only compromised by a dented Plymouth Breeze parked five bays over to his left. Then a bearded guy appeared, loaded it with shopping bags, backed up, and drove off toward the freeway.
The coupe’s interior was new-car empty, with that sickly new-car smell. Only a remote transmitter fob, resting in the cupholder, a rental agreement, protruding from a sun visor, and a pair of gold-framed Randolph Aviator sunglasses betrayed it had left the dealer. Odometer reading: 916. Fuel gauge: closing on E.
He touched a switch, a window slid down, and he shouted at the sedan. “Hey, sir.”
A Sentra door opened and Hoffman shouted back. “What you want? What is it? We’re talking.”
“You’re out of gas here, you know? Running on empty. You want I should go fill her up?”
“Sure, go ahead. Thanks. But don’t you be long. And don’t you forget, no phone.”
He hit the ignition, and the Camaro’s six-liter V-8 purred. Headlamps blazed back from the storefront. He reversed from the curb, spun a semicircle, and waited for an RV to pass. He turned right onto Talmage, and right again at State: now a Friday-night-is-party-night zoo. Every parking space was filled outside the Garden Cafe. The Regency Inn boasted, “No vacancies.” He turned right a third time, into a blaze of arc lights, and eased onto a Chevron pump.
He climbed from the vehicle, tugged open the fuel door, lifted a nozzle for high-octane Supreme, plugged it into the tank, and locked the grip.
Eighteen gallons throbbed as he grabbed a black squeegee, slapping its streaming sponge across the windshield. He flipped to the rubber blade, skimmed the glass dry, and did the same the other side. Front and back. Then he stepped to the pump and tapped his Mastercard.
But the reader wouldn’t read it.
Swipe card
He swiped.
Swipe card
He reached into the car, grabbed the remote fob transmitter from the cupholder, slammed the door, and thumbed the lock button. Then he crossed the forecourt to a snack-packed convenience store, where the clerk ran his card. No problem.
Back at the Camaro, he squeezed the fob again, but this time pressed something wrong. Instead of what was needed to unlock the coupe’s doors, he hit whatever opened the trunk. A metallic sound thumped from the back of the vehicle, and the lid swung up a few inches.
He moved to push it down, but then thought better, raised the lid, and looked inside. In the glow of a pale lamp, he saw two cardboard cartons, a duffel bag, and a brown leather briefcase. The cartons were labeled “Salomon ST Inline Skates” and “Pro-Tec Classic Helmet.”
The briefcase was monogrammed.
VG
Viraj Grahacharya. What else could it be? This must be Doctorjee’s bag.
But that was pretty strange. Why was it here? Did Doctorjee leave it in the car? Ben dragged it toward him and slipped open its jaws: a lunchbox and a handful of journals. He pulled one: Virology. Another: Nature. A third: Annals of Internal Medicine.
As he pressed them back, he spotted something else. He noticed writing on the cover of Nature. Below the title and subtitle (“The International Weekly Magazine of Science”), a single word in black Sharpie.
UKIAH
Was that Doctorjee’s writing? Ben held it near the light. He didn’t think it was. No, it wasn’t. There was none of the grandiosity: this was smaller, more normal. He yanked open the duffel bag, pulled a cardboard folder, and riffled to a contract.
THH
Theodore Hosea Hoffman. He wrote “Ukiah.” He must have written it as they talked on the phone. He must have made this note when they set up the meeting. Ben remembered spelling it out to him: “U-k-i-a-h.”
But why write this note on Doctorjee’s journal? And how did it get in the car? Were they both in the Camaro when Hoffman phoned? That didn’t make a whole lot of sense. He’d surely been somewhere else—most likely the hospital—where Doctorjee put the journal in his briefcase. Then somebody took the briefcase and put it in the car. And that’s why “Ukiah” was here.
Ben shut the trunk, wiped his face on a shirtsleeve, and considered the implications of this discovery. If Doctorjee had gotten a ride—say to a hotel in San Fran—then why leave his case in the car?
Shit, he thought, is Doctorjee here? Is the EVP here in Ukiah? Had Hoffman dropped him off somewhere on the way to the Bottle Shop, to wait on Doc Mayr’s reaction? Was he hanging around someplace, lying low, out of sight, while the general counsel got the lay of the land?
He opened the trunk again and now noticed something else: at the back, behind the skates and helmet. He saw a flat alloy case, like guitars are often shipped in, but not even one third of the size. He dragged it out, flicked the catches—snap, snap—raised the lid and fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
He banged shut the gun case and forced it out of sight. He slammed the trunk lid, leaped back into the coupe, and reversed to the rear of the gas station.
Luke’s voicemail kicked in. Ben tried the landline and heard his own voice. Fuck it, fuck. “You got the right number for Luke and Ben, but you got the wrong time. Start talking.”
Damn. Shit. Fuck. “You there? If you’re there, pick up. It’s me. Pick up… Fuck it, bro. If you’re out, please call me…
Call me tonight… Any time… This is heavy.”
Forty-one
THE DOUBLE doors swung open. The double doors swung shut. They swung open and shut once again. They’d swung open and shut for the past three hours. Sumiko could do little but watch. By now she was an expert on their chipped brown paint and the dark-stained pine underneath. She was unrivaled on the scuff marks on their shiny steel kick-plates and the grease on their safety glass panes. There was no greater authority in the State of California on Southern District Police Station doors.
She could hardly begin to grasp what insanity brought her. What absurdity, what screw-up, could explain it? Her mind could hardly process the information she’d received, her body hardly deal with the shock.
But soon she’d know. This would all make sense. The mistake would be fixed. And they’d go home.
She’d been contacted after five by a Mr. MacKenzie or McKechnie—an attorney retained by Sanomo. At the time, she’d been sealing a box of sharps for disposal, when Ardelia called through about a man on the phone who wouldn’t say who he was or what he wanted.
“Says it’s personal and confidential, and urgent as well. Says he needs to get to speak with you right away.”
Sumiko assumed it was Hiroshi or Ben—and wasn’t sure which she’d prefer. But MacKenzie/McKechnie introduced himself bluntly and gave the bare bones of what he knew. Dr. Murayama was being held in the Hall of Justice police station, at 850 Bryant, south of Market. He’d been arrested on suspicion of possession with the intent to sell more than five hundred grams of cocaine. This was a felony offense: up to four years in jail and a fine of up to twenty thousand dollars.
“But I’m only a corporate guy,” said MacKenzie/McKechnie. “I’m only the weekend guy, fixing bail.”