Murder Is Pathological

by P. M. Carlson

  He was watching her carefully, afraid he knew what came next.

  “And then, after four years, she meets a man, older than she is. You know how some people keep making the same mistake, over and over? He’s a wonderful man, all laughing blue eyes and intelligence and fun.”

  “Rob?”

  “Rob.”

  “Damn.”

  “Wonderful weeks. Promises, laughter, music. And then the end. Not married this time, but as good as.”

  “And she throws herself into her work and her friendships.”

  “And grieves. And then one day a scary thing happens. There’s a man, older than she is, all laughing eyes …”

  “Damn it, Maggie!”

  Her own eyes were sad. “The girl is a woman now, Nick. And she’s not stepping on that grid again.”

  “This time it’s not a mistake.”

  “Didn’t seem like one before.”

  “I’m not Rob! Not that engineer!”

  “I know! If I just sort of liked you, maybe I could convince myself. Don’t you see? It matters too much. And I’m scared as hell.”

  “You’re the bravest person I know.”

  “Not about this, Nick. I’d trust you with my life, but—” Her strong hands made a strangely soft, irresolute gesture.

  After a moment he said, “But not with yourself.”

  “That’s right. My fault, not yours. I don’t know, maybe I’m broken. But I just can’t.”

  “Hell.” Nick stood up, hands in pockets, and went to stand in the shadow next to the window. Brushed by moonlight, the silvery forest rolled away in all directions. The shade of melancholy boughs. Everything was hopeless. Done. Finished. Far below, the lab and parking lot sent brave little yellow lights into the surrounding shadows. He could make out Murph, leaning against the lamppost by the driveway. He should get back soon. See this silly charade through to the end. Or quit. Quitting suddenly had great appeal.

  Except, of course, that she was right. Someone was trying to sabotage Dr. Weisen’s experiment, an experiment that deserved support. Someone, probably the same someone, had killed Norman. Norman’s killer shouldn’t go free just because Nick’s own future stretched bleak and pointless before him. He no longer even had the hope that George had held out, that he could somehow forget. But at least he understood now. That was progress, maybe. And she had such an appetite for life, such courage. Could he still hope that she would heal someday? As for himself, he could at least avoid the blundering cruelties to friends like Carmen, now that he knew more firmly where he was. Alone, but with the self-knowledge to rule the pig-man. That was progress too.

  Maggie stirred a little. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  He looked back down over his shoulder. She was still sitting in the spatter of moonlight. “Chaotic thoughts,” he said. “Interspersed with curses for Rob. For that engineer. For Les and Monica.”

  She said, “Not Monica. I’m afraid she’s on your side.”

  “Anyway, you’re right, of course. We’ll just be buddies again.”

  “But I thought you wanted to change this situation. That’s why I explained. To help you forget.”

  “Maggie, for me that isn’t an option. I’m glued to that grid. I’ll just hang on as a friend. Settle for whatever you can manage.” He looked out at the forest again, and quoted, “I am a kind of burr; I shall stick.”

  She was quiet. He braced himself, and turned back with a Douglas Fairbanks swagger. “Well! Back to the lab, right? Mild-mannered Rick Donner, Olympic caliber janitor, returns to the ramparts!”

  She bounced up then, her eyes very shiny, and touched her fingertips lightly to his arm before she fled wordlessly down the ladder, still elusive as the wind.

  Tuesday night after dinner, Monica was in her room, gathering her notebooks for a trip to the library. One of the articles on her list was by researchers in Tennessee. It brought back that argument with Ted his senior year. His honors project, for a professor who specialized in metallurgy, had been on a Nitinol alloy. Monica remembered Valentine’s Day, when she had opened the package he gave her to find a foam plastic container full of ice.

  “This is supposed to make my heart go pitti-pat?” she asked, mystified.

  He didn’t take his arm from around her shoulder. “Keep looking,” he urged.

  She found a little plastic bag amidst the ice, but inside was just a little crushed snarl of wire, cold in her hand. “Ted, this doesn’t change my opinion, I’m afraid.”

  He was grinning. “Cherish it, Monica.”

  “Oh, goodness, yes, of course! I’ll sleep with it under my pillow, and wear it next to my heart!’’ She cupped it in her hand and clasped it to her breast.

  It began to move.

  “Ted, my God, it’s alive!” She jerked it away, stared at it.

  “Cherish it, Monica!” He was laughing at her.

  “But Ted! God!” Slowly, as it warmed in her hand, the tangled wire was unfolding itself, assuming a shape. A heart. And crude wire letters, T & M. “My God!”

  “The romance of chemistry.”

  “Ted! Is this that stuff for your honors project?”

  “Yep. Nitinol.”

  “It’s fantastic, Ted!” She inspected the clumsy valentine that had grown from the cold lump of wire, and kissed him.

  “Do I detect a little pitti-pat after all?”

  “The romance of chemistry. It’s magic.”

  “Yes. It also got me a job offer.”

  “A job? Where?”

  “An orthopedic center in Tennessee wants me to go there and work with this material. The idea is to use Nitinol to hold bones together while they knit, instead of those plates and bolts they use now. The Nitinol could be chilled and formed into a convenient shape for insertion, and then body heat would make it resume a shape that exerts the proper pressure and support for the bones.”

  “Ted, that’s great! That’s perfect! You can use what you know, and you’ll really be helping people!”

  He was frowning a little. “I’ve applied to Michigan too.”

  “I know. But this job sounds so good!”

  “It is good. Maybe I’ll take it.”

  “You mean you’d turn it down for more school? It won’t get you a more useful job, will it?”

  “No. But, Monica, what I really want is to understand things.”

  She was bewildered. “You don’t want to help those people? I mean, think of how many lives you could make better!”

  “I know. But, Monica, I want to know how things work. To me, the exciting thing about Nitinol is not what you can do with it. It’s the secrets of those molecules arranging themselves so that they remember what they were before they were chilled and crushed. I want to learn those secrets.” He grinned, spread his arms expansively. “I want to understand the universe!”

  “So do I, Ted. But shouldn’t helping people come first?”

  “Maybe it should. But I want to understand.”

  Monica looked at the funny heart again, at the magic wire that could help people heal. “You’ve got no morals, Ted Bauer.”

  “Yeah. Especially not on Valentine’s Day!” He wrestled her, laughing, onto the sofa. The secrets of the cosmos were forgotten for a time.

  Several days later he met her outside her comparative physiology class. Almost apologetically, he handed her three papers, and said, “Look, Ma, no morals.”

  In the top letter, Michigan appointed him to a graduate assistantship. The other two were carbons of his acceptance and of his refusal of the orthopedic center job. Monica saw the plea in his eyes and shrugged. “Selfish beast.” Then she smiled. “But listen, when you learn the secrets of the universe, tell me too.”

  He had not had time to learn many, of course. They had married and moved to Ann Arbor, but as soon as he finished his degree, he had been drafted.

  There was a knock on the door. Monica blinked the mistiness from her eyes and said, “Come in.”

  It was Maggie, h
olding her two packages of Zelle’s dog food. “Monica, can you spare a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  Maggie closed the door behind her. “This is a secret. Promise you won’t tell anyone at all.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Okay. Top secret. Cross my heart.” Monica was almost amused at her friend’s gravity. But when Maggie opened the packages, her throat tightened in protest.

  Three rats, smashed and broken like the ones Norman had shown her in the lab.

  She fought back her nausea, forced herself to be analytical. “Where did these come from?” she asked in a neutral voice.

  “The slaughters at the lab. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you more.”

  “I see.”

  “I have some questions about them, Monica.”

  Monica debated, and decided she would trust her. She was tired of suspicion, tired of friendlessness. She said, “All the rats Norman found looked like this. Did he give you these?”

  “I can’t tell you, Monica. Question one. To my untrained eye, they all seem to have very similar injuries. Is that true?”

  Monica looked more closely. “Yes. The pressure on the heads was applied at the same point. The blow on the back is almost identical.” She frowned. “Maggie, I think you’re right. I was so shocked I didn’t think to check. But I think maybe the injuries were the same on all of them. That’s surprising! Why?”

  “Question two. What did they die of?”

  “Either of those injuries would kill them!”

  “But wouldn’t there be blood? Wouldn’t they be shitting all over the place if someone with an ax was after them? The room and the cages were clean this time, Monica. Were they clean when you and Norman found them?”

  “I didn’t think to look.” Genuinely curious now, Monica picked up one of the chilly animals and inspected it with care. She repeated the process with the others, looked back at the first again, and shook her head. “All of them have cervical dislocation,” she reported. “It could have happened when the skulls were smashed, of course. But you’re right, there isn’t much bleeding, so I’d guess they were dead before the mutilation. Maggie, what’s going on? It’s not just a sadist, is it? Who’d mutilate dead rats?”

  Maggie repacked the rats in their bags, wrapped them in the freezer paper. “I don’t know. I do know we’d better not talk about this.”

  “But this could be an important clue for the police!”

  “The police don’t know anything about rats.”

  “We’ll explain! It might help them find the criminal.”

  “You promised not to tell, Monica.”

  “But Maggie! It could be important!”

  “Okay, look.” Maggie shifted her position. “Suppose we wait till Friday, okay? It seems to me that the last thing Dr. Weisen needs right now is police running around the lab. The last animals will be sacrificed tomorrow, then everyone works like hell to check the organs, then I work like hell to get the statistics done.”

  “Well, yes, but. . .”

  “I just don’t think Weisen needs the police now. It would be playing into the hands of the vandal to call them now.”

  The police had eaten up half a day last time. Monica hesitated, then said, “You’ll definitely tell them Friday?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Well—” Monica still didn’t like the idea of waiting. But it was true, they owed it to Dr. Weisen to get the work done.

  “But that means you mustn’t tell anyone else either. Okay? Because someone at that lab may be a murderer, Monica.”

  “Damn it, we should tell the police!”

  “Friday.”

  “All right, all right. Damn.”

  “Monica, do you have any ideas about what this might mean? I have the feeling that knowing about these rats is dangerous to someone. Why? Does it make sense to you?”

  “No. It doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense.”

  “Well, think about it. But don’t let anyone guess that you know anything.”

  “Until Friday.”

  “Right. One other thing. What’s this?”

  Monica inspected the paper, and was suddenly concerned. “It’s a schedule of treatments. Tumor agent, drug dosages. It’s part of Dr. Weisen’s study.”

  “And this scribble in the corner looks like Brighton.”

  “The Brighton Pharmaceutical Company. One of the companies bidding on the drug.”

  “Could it possibly be someone’s own research?”

  “Not unless he’s replicating Weisen’s experiment. And we’d know if he was doing that.”

  “Why would a drug company want it?”

  “To run their own tests. They could get a drug chemically similar to the one Weisen patented and duplicate his studies, and if they were lucky it would work too, and they’d own it. It would save them lots of money because they’d be building on the years of pilot work that went into the design of his experiment.”

  “So they’d be willing to pay for this information.”

  Monica nodded. “But who would do that to Dr. Weisen?”

  Nick was to be at the fire tower again tonight at ten, to meet Maggie. His buddy. Who didn’t trust him. He had had another restless night, a furious morning workout at the Y, and a long exhausting run through the back streets of Laconia, but nothing had helped. It was not the kind of problem he could attack; he could only stumble along, hang on to the friendship and the frustration. Meanwhile, the problems at the lab were distracting, at least. He made his nine p.m. rounds with care, checking Dr. Weisen’s last sets of rats carefully. They seemed as healthy as rats with tumors, undergoing chemotherapy, reasonably could be. Maybe things would be calm tonight. But as he came out of the experimental rooms, he heard a shout and a gunshot.

  He raced out the front door. Murph was rushing toward the end of the building toward the ridge. Beyond him, already in the shadow of the trees, a dark figure was running away. Murph fired again. The figure stumbled and then went on, disappearing into the blackness.

  “Did you hit him?” called Nick.

  “Hard to tell,” shouted Murph. “Wouldn’t stop when I yelled at him. I’m going after him!”

  “Wait!” said Nick. Murph paused, and Nick hurried to his side. “He doesn’t seem to be armed, or he’d be shooting back. Let me chase him. I know the woods. And he may be a decoy. You’d better check around here and see if he has any friends.”

  “Right.” Murph stalked toward the service door at the end of the lab.

  “Did he come from that door?” Nick asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Damn. I had it open earlier, fetching out the trash. It was twenty minutes or so before I barred it again. He probably sneaked in then.”

  “Well, hurry up. Guy’s quick. I yelled, but he was almost in the woods by the time I fired at him.”

  “Okay.” Nick unclipped his flashlight from his belt.

  The woods were murky, the moonlight dimmer than last night’s. Nick started at the point where he had seen the stumbling figure disappear, and hunted for a broken twig or footprint as a clue to the direction he should take. He found even more. A broad leaf was spattered with dark sticky circles; when he touched them, his fingers came up red in the flashlight beam. Murph’s aim had been good. Nick started off, inspecting his path with care. Damn, he should have gone for Eagle Scout when he had the chance.

  He had walked the area frequently in the past week and a half, often at night. But this nightmare hunt made it seem like foreign territory. Instead of searching for major landmarks, he searched for small indications of flight—snapped twigs, mashed undergrowth, and most of all, blood. The fugitive had clearly been too frantic for caution; and without a flashlight—or at least without daring to use one—he had left many traces of passage. The flight must seem even more nightmarish to him, thought Nick with a twinge of sympathy as a twig slashed his cheek. He paused, checked the path—more spatters. The prowler was losing b
lood steadily, but not in spurts. A vein, probably, not an artery. That steady sapping of strength meant that Nick had a good chance of catching him.

  Who was it? The murderer? The saboteur? Would this be the end of the search? Whoa, Nick old man. Quit counting chickens. One step at a time. First, don’t lose the trail.

  He had been listening for more shots, but none came. If there had been a companion, Murph had not found him, or had not had to shoot. Nick was unarmed, but all indications were that his quarry was unarmed, too, and probably weakened by loss of blood.

  Weakened, but not made stupid. The path of broken twigs led to the shelf of rock near the base of the ridge where plants did not grow and traveling was easier. Nick had often used it as a path himself. Now he found that the prowler had headed directly for it too; no more smashed plants or snapped twigs to follow here. Blood was a different story, though. With his light he could clearly see rocks with blood splashed on them. There were two arms to the path. One wound its way for a hundred yards or so toward the highway. The other narrowed and followed the base of the ridge past the rocky hollow where he and Maggie had sometimes met, ending a quarter-mile further on, downhill from the fire tower. The moonlight, dim, cast long fang-like shadows from each fragment of rock. He had to use his flashlight to see the spattered blood; the drops led clearly toward the highway. Odd, he thought as he moved on, the drops fall on individual rocks, and don’t touch the rocks next to them.

  He stopped, and with sudden conviction, turned the other way, toward the fire tower. After thirty yards of clear rock the drops began again. Ha, thought Nick exultantly, the old brain is still clicking along. The Daniel Boone of Laconia. This fugitive was desperate, and clever enough to turn his wound into a deception, tossing the telltale rocks in the other direction to lay a false trail. Must have some strength left after all.