by Glenn Cooper
Cyrus slipped into a higher gear and asked a series of rapid-fire questions. Did Thomas have any serious conflicts with members of the group? Could he get a list of members? Did Thomas have any enemies? Did Alex know whether he engaged in illicit activities? What did he know about Thomas’s relationship with Davis Fox?
Alex’s short, bland answers added nothing. Then Cyrus caught him off guard with, “Do you know any prostitutes?”
Alex finally pulled his feet off the desk. “What?”
“Prostitutes. Know any? Use any?”
For the first time, Alex got surly. “Absolutely not! I’ve got a girlfriend. Why are you asking me that?”
Cyrus’s mobile rang. He was going to ignore it but the caller ID said MARIAN so he picked up, listened to her then said, “I’m just down the street from Children’s. I can meet you there in ten minutes.”
He put the phone away. “I’ve got to take off. Thank you for your time, Doctor Weller. I may need to talk with you again.”
Alex rose, momentarily towering over him until Cyrus stood himself. Alex’s anger over the last question seemed to have dissipated and he said in a quiet, almost pastoral voice, “You’re going to Children’s Hospital?”
Cyrus put his coat back on and didn’t answer.
“Do you have a sick child?”
Cyrus found himself nodding. There was an odd expression on Weller’s face. He reached into the breast pocket of a white lab coat hanging on a nearby hook. There was a stack of three-by-five cards stamped with names and scribbled with notes. He rifled through them like he was looking for jokers in a deck before plucking out one card. Cyrus couldn’t imagine what he was up to.
“Your daughter’s name isn’t Tara O’Malley, is it?”
It was like getting hit in the gut by a thick piece of wood. Cyrus felt sick. His ears rang. He nodded again.
“Her surgeon, Bill Thorpe, asked me to see her. I’ve been adjusting her seizure medications. I’ve met your wife.”
“Ex-wife,” Cyrus said automatically, fishing for something else to say.
“Well, this is a bit awkward, isn’t it?” Alex said. “Would you like me to walk over with you?”
Cyrus reached for the doorknob. He wanted to get out of the building into the cold air. “She just had another seizure.”
“Let me call over and make sure one of the other attendings sees her right away. Perhaps, under the circumstances, I should transfer her care to a colleague.”
Cyrus swallowed and nodded. “That would be good.”
“Let me say this,” Alex added. “She’s a lovely girl. A perfectly lovely little girl.”
Eight
It was late and the neurology ward was quiet. When Alex was a young boy in England staying with his grandparents in the village of Gressingham, he and his brother used to sneak into the parish church around midnight. The heavy oak door in the old Norman tower was always unlocked so they really weren’t being delinquent but it felt naughty and dangerous and that’s why they were drawn to it. The dark, narrow nave was full of musty dead air. He’d touch the smooth pulpit and nervously whisper to his brother about an imagined noise coming from the large tomb in the chapel. These were the things he remembered, walking through the ward that night.
Standing outside Room 919 he looked around to see if anyone was in the corridor. It was still deserted. He went inside and quietly put on a sterile gown, gloves, and mask.
Tara O’Malley was asleep. Though another neurologist had taken over her case, he was drawn to her in a new context: no longer his patient, she was the daughter of a man who was pursuing him.
He picked up her chart and flipped through it. She’d been seizure-free for several days. Her blood counts were coming back, her infection clearing. She’d be going home soon; but her last MRI was disturbing. The tumor was on the prowl.
He stood over her. Her plump lips parted with each breath. Pretty as a china doll, he thought. Cyrus O’Malley was going to miss her.
Nine
The last leaves of the season were whipping past the big windows and settling onto the quadrangle. That Saturday, Alex was alone in his lab, his skin prickling with anticipation. He liked being the only one there, uninhibited, flitting from bench to bench, reagent to reagent, machine to machine, humming, singing snippets of pop tunes stuck in his head, waiting for the LC-mass spec to spit out his data. No prying eyes. No small talk. No seemingly innocent questions to answer.
He was on the brink.
He could feel it.
It was neither guesswork nor intuition: he was a very good scientist, plain and simple. He likened his quest to one of those big, concentric circle mazes where you start on the outside and draw your way in until your pencil stops dead center. There was heaviness in the air and lightness in his head. Would today be the day he was going to reach the center?
Every set of samples inched him closer. Every experiment had chipped away at the mantle of rock, exposing more of the crystal gemstone at its kernel.
Poor Thomas Quinn had not died in vain. He took comfort in that, he really did. The two-minute sample of Thomas’s cerebrospinal fluid had revealed a small telltale spike at 854.73 m/z. At three minutes, the value was off the charts.
854.73.
To Alex, there was no more important number in the world, the mass-to-charge ratio: the precise peak on his mass spectrometry instrument where his beautiful unknown showed itself over and over. He had first laid eyes on that peak two years earlier when a brilliantly simple experiment in mice yielded the same result time after time. The idea had come to him in a eureka-type of flash, so obvious in retrospect that he was pained it had taken him so long to think of it. Emboldened, he started to climb the evolutionary ladder. Rats had the same peak. Cats. Dogs. Monkeys.
And man?
A subject was needed.
Who else but himself? At least that was the plan. He’d need Thomas’s help to be sure; Thomas was the ideal partner for an ethically challenged experiment. He was adept, discreet, part of Alex’s inner circle.
Following that terrible night in the dog lab, he had spent two weeks in a state of alternating despair and ecstasy. He had murdered a man. From his limited knowledge of the law it could have been manslaughter, but Thomas nevertheless was dead and he had caused it. His anxiety skyrocketed when the body was found. Every day the articles in the papers would send him into a panic—then the agonizing phone call from the police and the interview with a simpleton detective that had meandered and mercifully sputtered.
Yet, the data was so perfect, so validating, that it almost liberated him from guilt and sent him soaring. Thomas had the peak too: just as predicted; but this was only the beginning. What molecule was lurking at 854.73 m/z? What was its chemistry, its biology? Was it his Holy Grail? There was no point trying to isolate it from lower species. He eventually had to go to man anyway …
To really know.
At night, lying awake next to Jessie’s slumbering warmth, so much heat from so small a body, he would turn his mind into a rollicking debating society, arguing the pros and cons of his next steps. He wasn’t a murderer, he was a biologist. He wasn’t Mengele—he was a scientist. Should a few be sacrificed for the greater good? Could the end justify the means? Even if it did, could he stomach the act?
Could he live with himself?
Still, he couldn’t make the decision. In a madly detached way he felt he had to delegate it to someone else. Then, one night, staring at the dark ceiling, he found the decision transcendently taken out of his hands. He felt like a marionette, his movements controlled by invisible wires. He shifted to an altered consciousness whereby he became external observer, passively watching himself get dressed, drive to the lab, sign in at the security desk, pick up his sample tubes and instruments, sneak out a rear exit, hop into his car and cruise the streets.
The black girl was plump and unattractive: perversely, that had helped. He heard himself invite her into the car and observed the drive across the river
to his garage. He watched himself strangle her, enduring her blows until she stopped fighting. Then he dispassionately viewed the medical procedures—the piercing of the skull, penetration of the ventricles, the satisfying rush of clear cerebrospinal fluid filling the barrel of the syringe.
When it was done he waited for the trembling to start but it didn’t. He remained cool. There was a body to dump, tubes to process at the lab. Only when he was back in bed next to Jessie did his body start to shake uncontrollably. Jessie awakened and probably thought he was having one of his nightmares because she held him, cooing and soothing until she regained sleep while he fought it, staying awake until the morning for fear of replaying the killing in his dreams.
It got easier.
The next two murders took on the quality of smoothly replicated experiments and he was able to quickly blot them from his mind and pay less attention to the newspaper stories that followed. Each new set of samples moved the ball farther down the field. He was learning more and more about his mystery peak, refining his methodologies, working out how to fractionate the samples. He felt like a hunter closing in on his prey, slowly, painstakingly flushing it from the thick undergrowth until he had it in his sights, a finger curled around the cold hard trigger.
He had learned so much from Thomas and the first two women. He had high hopes that the samples from the third prostitute, the pumpkin girl, would allow him to fractionate his mystery peak into a pure aliquot—and from there, a structure; then from structure to synthesis, synthesis to biology, and, finally, from biology to real answers. Yes, he told himself again and again, the end does justify the means.
The pumpkin girl was the youngest and that was exciting. Thomas was in his late thirties. The first two prostitutes were in their late twenties and their mystery peaks were even more abundant. He’d seen the same things in animals and had tucked the observation away. Younger animals had bigger peaks. The pumpkin girl was the youngest yet, twenty-two.
Cyrus O’Malley, this inconsequential man, had interrupted his reverie and pulled him back into the world of fear and hazard. O’Malley had clearly connected the dots between Thomas and the others, but that was inevitable. He had nothing concrete, he was fishing; otherwise, he would have played his cards already. Alex had been as careful as he could: gloves to prevent DNA transfer, leather car seats and plastic floor mats to avoid fibers. The drill bit and needles obsessively autoclaved. The syringes, melted into plastic globs. He was sure he was safe, at least for the time being, especially if the pumpkin girl was the last.
He prayed she was the last.
And what of the exquisite irony, that his pursuer’s daughter was his patient? This was a triangle, he thought; no, a circle! Like the Uroboros! O’Malley had the power of the FBI over him, he had the power of a doctor over Tara, and she had the power of a sick child over her father. A serpent swallowing its tail: it was meant to be, he thought. All this was meant to happen.
His Agilent LC-MS system was a state-of-the-art instrument purchased under his last NIH grant. It could separate unknown compounds in complex mixtures and then identify them through mass spectrometry analysis. Throughout the afternoon he followed the instrument’s progress via its graphical interface and drew closer to the bench when he saw that fraction 6 was being processed. He stopped humming and stood silent before the monitor, watching the countdown to readout as if he were watching a rocket launch. Thirty seconds. Fifteen. Ten … he held his breath. Three seconds.
854.73.
The fraction was pure. No other peaks.
And it was lavishly abundant.
He had a large, pure sample of his beautiful unknown.
He could see the pumpkin girl’s face in his mind.
The younger the better.
He exhaled and felt gloriously light-headed.
The killings could stop.
Ten
Alex pushed the living room furniture around and tossed pillows and cushions onto the floor until there was an imperfect circle. These Saturday evenings meant everything to him but tonight he had trouble keeping his mind off the screw-topped plastic tube chilling in the fridge beside a carton of eggs.
His place was tastefully furnished, nothing very expensive but each piece chosen with care. It wasn’t a large house, about the size of his childhood home in Liverpool: living room, dining room, kitchen and master bedroom on the ground floor, two guest rooms up top. A small back yard had enough green space for an herb and vegetable garden and a barbecue.
There were a few admirable pieces scattered about the house, some objets d’art, wooden and brass statuary of Hindu gods, African masks, Chinese ceramics and, over the mantel in pride of place, a fine nineteenth-century copy of a drawing by Theodorus Pelecanos, from his fifteenth-century book of alchemy, of the pink and gold Uroboros. And books, of course: shelves and shelves of books on art, religion, the occult, mythology, philosophy, anthropology and the natural sciences. He aspired to nothing more materially. He was well-satisfied. Financially, he’d already achieved more than his father had during a life of heavy toil, and that was enough.
Jessie was in the kitchen making hummus. This, she held, was her main contribution to the salons. She had made it abundantly clear to Alex that she felt intellectually outgunned by the high-octane minds who gravitated to Alex’s orbit, so typically she remained silent through the proceedings, keeping the snacks coming, making sure the beer and white wine were well-chilled, and tending to accidents on their more avant-garde nights.
Alex sneaked up behind her, watching her for a few moments as she worked the food processor. He felt a powerful wave of love wash over him. Her red-orange hair, the color of leaping flames, fell over her black sweater. She was a foundling, a good ten years younger than he, plucked from a bookstore in Harvard Square where, three years earlier, he had been browsing on a Sunday. When he took his paperbacks to the register, he had looked across the counter into her milky oval face with jade eyes and cherry lips and those cascades and ringlets of Pre-Raphaelite fiery hair and had been utterly captivated.
She was a townie, a dropout, drifting on a quiet sea of menial jobs, enduring a succession of unreliable roommates. She’d never before had anyone like Alex in her life—a powerful spinning bowling ball, knocking a light pin into the air. She tumbled happily and landed squarely inside his sphere of influence. He was everything to her: father, brother, teacher, friend and lover. She idolized him and made few demands, grateful for every day with him; and he cherished and protected her like a delicate hothouse flower.
Now he surprised her by cupping her small breasts and using his nose to part her hair to find a patch of skin on the back of her neck to kiss.
She laughed. “What’s that for?”
“Love.”
“I like that. How many are coming?”
“I never really know. The weather’s fine. Probably fifteen or so.”
“I still miss Thomas.”
“Me too.” He let go of her.
“You worked all day,” she scolded. “Lie down for an hour. I’ll bring you some wine.”
He kissed the top of her head. “I can’t live without you.”
“You don’t have to.”
Davis Fox arrived first, pecking both Jessie’s cheeks, European style. Alex could tell straight off that he wished to talk. He took him into his bedroom and shut the door.
“Are you okay?” Alex asked.
“Just a bit pissed off.”
“Why?”
“That FBI agent called me again.”
“When?”
“This afternoon. He asked when we were having our next salon.”
Alex blanched but tried to be nonchalant. “Really? What did you tell him?”
“I told him to ask you and then he asked me for your mobile number. When I said I was uncomfortable giving it out, he said he could get it anyway and asked why I was being unhelpful so I wound up giving it to him. I hope that was okay.”
Alex reached for his cell phone on th
e bedside table. It was off and when he powered it back up, there was a message waiting from an unknown caller.
“Much ado about nothing,” Alex murmured. “Let’s hope they catch the murderer rather than wasting their bloody time on us.”
He sent Davis to the kitchen for a glass of wine and sat on the bed to listen to the voice message. The nerve! O’Malley wanted to attend one of the salons, talk to the group about Thomas.
Alex felt a pitting nausea. O’Malley wasn’t going away. He could hear the persistence in his voice. He angrily imagined calling him back, telling him to leave him the hell alone … for the sake of his daughter. The threat would make O’Malley disappear. A fantasy.
Everything would have to move faster now. He was on the threshold. He would not and could not be denied. Every hour and every day standing between him and the answer was precious, every minute wasted, a tragedy. He wished he could have canceled the salon to get on with things, but that was out of the question.
The others arrived in ones and twos.
Frank Sacco, his young pimply technician, came and sat by himself. He never interacted much, a fish out of water, and Alex had long regretted ever having invited him. It wasn’t a good idea to mix lab business with his other interests—especially now—but what was done was done; he couldn’t disinvite Frank, not without raising a red flag.
Larry Gelb, a cherubic philosophy professor from Brandeis, arrived with his much younger Korean girlfriend, a former student of his, and tossed his Che-style beret onto one of the cushions. Arthur Spangler, a curly-haired biochemist from Tufts Medical School with nineteenth-century mutton-chop sideburns, headed straight for the hummus and began making the rounds, curious if anyone had any spliffs. The room filled with old friends and academic colleagues from the elite colleges and universities in Boston, warmed by one another’s company and Alex’s patented bear hugs, which he meted out in a distracted way.
