There was no carpet on the floor. Actual work took place here.
Brushed-metal double doors opened, and I turned to see a woman who I hoped was Dr. Rodriguez. “Hoped” because the woman was quite a looker, to put it mildly, and I wouldn’t mind spending thirty minutes of quality time with her.
“Dr. McCormick?”
“Yes. Dr. Rodriguez?” I hoped, I hoped.
She nodded. Excellent. It’s the little things in life that count.
“Follow me, please,” she said coolly.
I followed her—thirties, olive skin, shoulder-length black hair, copper lips that begged to be kissed and bitten—through the doors and down a long white corridor, each side flanked by antiseptic-looking labs.
“You’re from the area?” she asked.
“No. Pennsylvania. But”—I didn’t see the need to discuss my problems in “the area” from years before—“I live here now. Before that, I worked all over.”
“I saw that on your résumé.”
Dr. Rodriguez opened a door and led me into a small office suite—an administrative assistant’s desk with a male administrative assistant behind it, gray carpet, white walls, four doors leading to individual offices. We walked to the far door, to a modest office with a good view. There was a single, framed picture amongst the reference books: a black-and-white of a woman, hands jammed into a thin crack on a sheer face of rock.
“Please, have a seat, Dr. McCormick.”
I sat. She took off her lab coat, revealing a short-sleeved blouse and well-muscled arms. “That’s you?” I pointed at the picture.
“Yes,” she said, and gave me no more detail. If I’d been hoping for a little light flirting, I was disappointed. Dr. Rodriguez was all business. She began flipping through my CV.
“Peace Corps. Medical school at the University of Maryland. Internal medicine residency at the University of North Carolina. CDC for two years. What did you do between college and medical school? I don’t see it here.”
Ah, The Question. Since it had been a long time since my last job interview, I hadn’t thought about my approach to the inevitable inquiry concerning that big, four-year gap. Come clean about it? Tell her I’d been kicked out of the med school thirty miles south of here for cheating and fighting? Do what I did for my CDC interview and spin it, tell her I just wasn’t ready for medical school at the time, took a leave of absence, then headed to Maryland to finish?
Since I didn’t want her to throw me out of the building before I got some information, I took the CDC approach. Hey, it worked in the past.
“So, you were here for your first two years of medical school?” she asked.
“And two more years in a PhD.”
She paused for a moment, thinking. “And you left.”
“I did. I was too young. Too stupid.”
“Well, I have to assume you’re older and wiser now. You did quite a job for the CDC.” She must have seen my surprise. She said, “I read the papers about your exploits here last year. And I have to tell you, what you did for Chimeragen didn’t help the industry much in the short term.”
I didn’t know how to take that.
“But we’re much healthier now,” she said. “Much more by-the-book.”
“Good to know.”
She tucked the résumé back into its file. “For someone from the public sector, for someone who had such an exciting job and who seemed to be doing so well in that job, why switch now?”
I wanted to say, Because I’m here to figure out what happened to the employee who had his throat cut. But I didn’t think that would fly on a first interview. I said: “I burned out with CDC. And I’ve always found research fascinating.” I realized how lame I sounded, so I added, by way of credentializing myself, “In my PhD, I worked on hepatitis C.”
Research might be fascinating, but this interview wasn’t. I talked about my decade-old hep C work, she talked about the antiviral project. Twenty minutes after the interview began, Dr. Rodriguez asked me if I had any more questions. Well, you know what? I did.
“Did you know Paul Murphy?”
The beautiful round face froze.
“Yes,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
“I was a friend of his.”
The frozen look again, then Dr. Rodriguez blinked. “I’m sorry for the loss,” she said woodenly. Then she ended the interview.
20
ALEXANDRA RODRIGUEZ STEPPED OUT OF THE office, returned a minute later, telling me to follow her to meet Dan Missoula. As it turned out, Dr. Missoula made his home fifteen feet away. At the doorway, the beautiful Dr. Alexandra Rodriguez and I shook hands. Her fingers were cold.
“We’ll be in touch,” she said.
Dan Missoula’s office was relatively large with relatively large windows. Dan Missoula was a relatively small man with a questionably sparse beard and an unquestionably fierce grip. He squeezed the living hell out of my hand, like he was trying to make up for five lost inches by bringing me to tears. I instantly disliked the man.
We had another pro forma interview. Actually, it wasn’t as much an interview of me as it was a narrative of Dr. Missoula’s spectacular career—in his mind at least—from early days as a Harvard undergrad and Harvard grad to a UCLA postdoc to a number of forgettable biotechs to his current post as head of the antiviral division of Tetra. He didn’t get to the part about why he was still upper-middle management at a second-tier company.
When Danny Boy did actually get around to asking me about me, he zeroed right in on that damning chasm in my résumé.
“So, you just—as you said—you were just too young?”
“I think so.”
“Weren’t there a lot of young people there? In your class?”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t any younger than they were, though.”
“Not most of them, no. I was immature. Maybe that’s a better word.”
“It was hard?” he asked with mock innocence. “That’s what you’re saying?”
“It wasn’t the right time for me. I should have waited a year.”
“I see. Well, Harvard was hard, my friend. You heard of—?” He mentioned a brand-name chemistry professor up at the big H, a Nobel laureate, who was famous for having had a few grad students and postdocs commit suicide. “My PI made that guy look like a Girl Scout.” Missoula said it as if it were something to be proud of.
Okay, I knew why I was there, and it was not to shoot off my mouth. I was there to infiltrate the organization, to talk to people who might know something about Paul Murphy and why he died. But how long would that take? How long until I wended my way through the hiring process? And how in the hell would I be able to work with someone like Dan Missoula?
But I’m rationalizing. Truth is that Dan Missoula had picked at a scab and broken through to the raw parts underneath. Truth is that Dan Missoula was an intolerable fuck. So I lost my temper and shot myself in the foot. “Your lab sounds worse than Jonestown. How many suicides?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Oh. Well…what is the point?”
Dan Missoula huffed once. “It was a damned pressure cooker is the point.”
“Gosh,” I said, “Harvard sounds like it was really super tough.”
“You have no idea.”
I did, in fact, have an idea. Most academic science is a damned pressure cooker. The pressure in my lab in school was enough to make me crack, to make me cheat and lie, to get me kicked out.
“Tetra’s a pressure cooker, Dr. McCormick. We work on tight deadlines.”
“Not pressure like Harvard, I’m sure.”
Dense as he was, Dan Missoula began to understand I was busting his balls. I should say something here in defense of my sabotaging any chance at a job: Harvard people generally annoy the shit out of me. Their self-serving sob stories, like theirs is the only institution in the world that breaks their students. The annoying trait where they can’t let five minutes pass without letting you know they
studied “in Cambridge.”
“Pressure like that,” he said. “Survival of the fittest.”
“Good. I’ve been doing a lot of push-ups lately and—”
“Okay, Dr. McCormick. That’s very funny.” He smiled broadly as if everything were actually okay, which, of course, we both knew it wasn’t.
“Sorry,” I said. “I tend to be a joker sometimes. I find it lightens the pressure in the labs.”
He stood. Crap.
“We do serious business here, Doctor.”
“Exactly why I’m here.”
“Exactly why you’re not here, Dr. McCormick. I’ll show you out.”
If I’d had Murph’s gun just then, I would have knee-capped myself just for being so stupid, so aggressive.
I stood, shuffled at a desultory pace out the door. My big day—my chance to find something useful—was a bust.
At least when we shook hands in the atrium, after he’d safely seen me through security, I’d be ready for the killer handshake. I flexed my fingers.
But we didn’t get that far.
“Dan?” It was Alexandra Rodriguez, making her way from her office toward us. “I thought I’d give Dr. McCormick a little tour of the labs. Give him a sense of what we have to offer here.” She didn’t look at me, but kept her eyes on Dr. Missoula. “He spent some time in the lab, after all.”
Dan Missoula looked at me, then at Rodriguez. “I don’t think that’s necessary at this point—”
“Of course it is,” she told Missoula. “It’ll give us a chance to show off.”
“Alex—”
Without giving Danny the chance to continue, Dr. Rodriguez opened the outer door of the office suite and held it for me. “Dr. McCormick, please follow me.”
21
“HOW DID IT GO WITH Dan?” she asked, leading me down the hallway. Her tone was weirdly informal, like somehow in the past half hour she had had the chance to think and decided we’d become friends.
“You heard of Waterloo?”
She didn’t laugh. “He can be a little intimidating.”
“I guess that’s the word.”
There was an ID card hanging from a lanyard around Dr. Rodriguez’s neck; she swiped it against a black panel next to a metal door. There was a click.
“This is where we do our cell cultures, transfections and the like. I’m going to have to ask you to stay near the door. We’re absolutely freaked about contamination.”
I liked the way she used that phrase—“absolutely freaked”—it made her sound more human, or at least more like the humans toward whom I gravitate.
The facility was huge, extending forty feet in either direction from the door. There were three banks of lab benches, three separate cell culture rooms. On a bench near us, a small PCR machine cycled away.
“This is just for the antiviral drug?” I asked her.
“We share it with the cancer group.” There were a few researchers milling around the space. One of them, a guy with dyed blond hair and two of those big, round earrings expanding his earlobes, walked in front of us, pipette in hand. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt under his lab coat.
Unexpectedly, all of a sudden, I missed the lab. I missed the camaraderie. I missed the oddball, smart people.
But I wasn’t going to be part of a lab anytime soon. Not at Tetra, at least.
“How well did you know Paul?” I asked Dr. Rodriguez.
“Pretty well,” she said evenly.
“Did he ever say anything to you? About…well, about anything?”
Alexandra Rodriguez was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Let me show you what else we do here.”
22
WE SPENT THE NEXT TWENTY minutes on a whirlwind tour of Tetra Biologics. We hit the diabetes labs, then the tissue regeneration labs. All I got from Dr. Rodriguez was that these two products—for diabetes and tissue regeneration—were going well. The diabetes trials were in Phase 1, which meant Tetra was testing safety in humans. The tissue regeneration project—Regenetine—had passed Phase 1 and was in Phase 2, which established efficacy. “Regenetine is going very, very well,” she told me.
“Your blockbuster,” I said, recalling what Francie Hartman had said. “We hope.”
In the Regenetine labs, Dr. Rodriguez introduced me to one of the lead scientists on the project. Jonathan Bly was a tall, sallow man with thinning hair and an exhausted stoop. We shook hands. His long cold fingers wrapped loosely around mine. I felt I was shaking hands with a corpse.
“Dr. Bly is going to make us the next Genentech,” Alexandra Rodriguez told me.
“We’ll see,” Bly murmured. He seemed about to keel over.
“I was telling Dr. McCormick how well everything was going.”
“Yeah. It’s going well.”
Alexandra Rodriguez lowered her voice. “Dr. McCormick was a friend of Paul Murphy’s.”
Bly’s eyes flicked toward mine, then away. “I’m sorry about your loss,” he said mechanically.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Excuse me,” he said. “We have a lab meeting in ten minutes.”
And with that, he turned from us, his white coat fluttering behind him.
“I guess I’m not understanding something here,” I said to Dr. Rodriguez as we watched Bly push through the thick white doors to the hallway.
“What’s that?”
“How is a wound-healing drug going to be a blockbuster? I mean, it’s wound healing, not heart disease or depression. Seems like the market would be relatively limited.” I started thinking out loud. “Postsurgical. Trauma. Battlefield.”
She cut me off with a look that I couldn’t quite place. Not an unpleasant look, but not nice, either. “There are a lot of wounds in the world, Dr. McCormick. Lots of them.”
23
WE WERE IN TETRA’S CAFETERIA, a big, airy room with long white tables and hard—what else?—white chairs. Both of us had our coffee. It was, to say the least, very weird. Tetra wasn’t going to hire me, that much was clear. And yet I got the whole dog-and-pony show. I couldn’t make sense of it.
“Thanks for the tour, Dr. Rodriguez.”
“Please. It’s Alex.”
“Alex? Like—?”
“Yes.”
I smiled. “Anybody call you A-Rod?”
“A lot of people call me A-Rod. I hate the name A-Rod. I’m older than that overpaid jerk. I’ve always been ‘Alex’ and refuse to change it no matter how much crap I get.” She took a sip of the coffee, somehow making it look sexier than if she were unhitching a garter belt. She really was a beautiful woman. “I suppose we should talk about Paul.”
That conversational shift happened so abruptly, I sloshed scalding coffee into my mouth. Pain is for the weak, though, and I swallowed the bolus, blistering my esophagus. “I suppose.”
She leaned close. “Tell me, Dr. McCormick—”
“Nate. Please.”
“Tell me, Nate: how much of this was about a job, and how much about Paul Murphy?”
I tongued the raw parts of my mouth and sized her up. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t taken by her looks, by the change from schoolmarm to buddy-buddy. “About fifty-fifty.”
“Phooey.”
“‘Phooey’? No one says ‘phooey’ anymore.”
“I’m an old-fashioned gal.”
“Yeah. The old-fashioned rock climber.” I smiled. “Sixty-forty. Maybe seventy-thirty.”
“Now we’re talking. Let’s discuss why seventy percent of you is here. I have to tell you, though, we already talked to the police about what happened.”
“We?”
“Me. Others who work here. People who knew Paul.”
“Did he have many friends here?”
“I don’t think he had any bosom buddies or anything like that. He seemed very involved with his family.”
“You? How well did you know him?”
“About the same. Maybe a little better.”
Call me old-fashioned, but I fou
nd it hard to believe that a man like Paul Murphy and a woman like Alex Rodriguez would be anything but acquaintances or lovers. Nothing in between. “Just friends, huh?”
“Yes, Nate. Just friends.”
“I wanted to know,” I said, “if there was anything you noticed. Or anything anyone here noticed.”
“Nothing strange, which seems very strange, doesn’t it?” She took another pull on her coffee. “Like I said, though, we were work friends. Nothing ever seemed to change with Paul. Came to work, left work, went home. A good-humored, stable rock.” She turned from me, looked out the cafeteria window to a brilliant September day. “A good-humored, stable rock who’s now—I still can’t believe what happened.” She swiveled her head back toward me. “Why are you doing this?”
“What?”
“Going through the trouble of an interview. Asking those questions.”
“I’m an investigator. It’s in my blood.”
“You investigate things ten microns across.”
“So maybe I’m tired of looking for things I can’t see.” A-Rod, by the look on her face, was not satisfied with my answer. “And I feel I owe something to Paul. And his kids and wife.”
“Why?”
“He asked for my help.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Which is why I’m here.”
Alex stared at me.
“He thought he was being followed,” I said. “I mean I think he was being followed, too. I saw the car.”
“Who was it? Why?”
“I don’t know. Which is—”
“Which is why you’re here. I got that.” Alex began aimlessly swirling the cup in her hand. “Isn’t this great? A man and his family are murdered and nobody knows anything.”
She leaned back in her chair, ran her fingers through the dark hair. “I need to stop obsessing about this. I have a project to run. When I found out you were a friend of Paul’s, I wanted to know if you had any new information, and now I do, and it helps me settle down not one little bit.”
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