Obsessed

by G. H. Ephron

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “And how old was your father when he started to lose his mind? When he began to show symptoms of dementia? This cure you’re looking for. It’s personal, isn’t it? Your bid to survive. When you look at your own brain scan, what do you see? How long do you figure you have?”

  Shands took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “My father was only fifty-nine when he started to become forgetful. His brother was in his early sixties.” Shands gave me a hard look. He raised his hand and pointed a finger at me. “I figure I have just a few years less than you do.” Was there a slight tremor in his hand, or was I seeing what I expected to see?

  “Will I last that long?” I asked. “Or will I get sick, like all those other patients? Suddenly not feeling so well. Will I get to the hospital in time, or will I wait, assuming it’s just the flu? Then by the time they put me on antibiotics, the infection is raging and nothing can be done.”

  I put my palm down on the list of patients, all those people who’d been killed in order to save Shands from the same miserable fate. I pushed the list toward him.

  “You’re a researcher. Is it even remotely possible that chance alone could account for this number of deaths in this close proximity to a similar event—having an appointment at your lab?”

  “What you’re suggesting…” he began, his voice raspy. I could see the realization taking hold. “I would never, ever deliberately hurt one of our patients.”

  He picked up the list of names and stared at it. He drew his finger carefully down it, then he gazed off into space.

  “No,” he whispered. “It’s not—” He paused and seemed to gather strength. He stood up suddenly, his chair scraping on the linoleum. “Where’s the phone? I have to make a call.”

  I looked at him, open-mouthed. What was happening?

  “You can use my—” I started, taking out my cell phone. But he was already loping toward the pay phone at the back of the diner.

  I followed. He barely noticed Annie as he hurried past. When he’d disappeared through the swinging doors marked REST ROOMS and PHONE, Annie gave me a discreet thumbs-up.

  I went back to wait. I took a drink of Coke and fished out an ice cube to suck on. I thought about Shands’s reactions. First surprise. Then denial. Finally what I thought might be horror. I crunched down on the ice. Was it possible that he didn’t realize what was going on? I glanced toward the back of the diner.

  I took another sip of Coke. Shands’s coffee was growing tepid. Jimmy came over to me.

  “Your friend?” he jerked a thumb in the direction of the rest room. “He left the back way.”

  Annie must have heard because she came bolting from around the corner. She had her cell phone out. “It will take about thirty seconds for them to erase that whiteboard. An hour more to shred the files.”

  She started out to the parking lot, dialing as she ran. I raced in front of her and opened my car. We both got in.

  “He’s not in his office?” Annie said into the phone. “Well, page him. It’s important.”

  I accelerated onto the road and almost immediately came to a halt at a red light.

  “Mac? It’s me, Annie.”

  The light turned green. I took off again and moved into the left lane.

  Annie put her hand on the dashboard to steady herself.

  “You know that MRI lab in Cambridge where there was a murder a few weeks ago? Well, it turns out they’re killing patients, too. They’re making them sick so that they come down with an infection. Peter and I are headed over—” She paused. “Well, I know because I overheard a conversation—” There was another pause.

  Now we were heading down a crowded Fresh Pond Parkway toward the river. Rush-hour traffic was starting to build. Cars backed up approaching the rotary—a torture device invented in the 1800s to manage horse-and-buggy traffic. Some drivers dither trying to enter, others just barrel ahead. I’m a barreler, and the guy in front of me was a ditherer. I leaned on the horn.

  “Well, we had some evidence, a list with names and dates that makes it pretty obvious what’s going on. But it got stolen.”

  There was another pause. Annie listened, shaking her head as she stared the window. “What do I want you to do?” Annie said. “Meet us over there. If we don’t move fast they’ll destroy the records.”

  Now we were merging onto Memorial Drive.

  “Search warrant? Are you kidding? You know how long that’s going to take. There was already a murder there. Can’t you get a follow-up search, an extension of whatever search warrant you’ve already got?”

  I accelerated as the light turned yellow at JFK Street, swerving around the crowd of pedestrians nudging their way into the crosswalk. A short distance later, we passed the big Shell sign, which that day was reading HELL.

  “Yes, I know you can’t turn on a dime. Uh-huh, probable cause.” Annie leaned her head against the window. “Right. I know you need evidence. But if we don’t get over there now there won’t be any.”

  I wove my way through pothole-ridden streets lined with warehouses and pulled into the driveway of the Sidney Street garage.

  “Damn,” Annie said, turning off her phone. “Bureaucratic bullshit.”

  I pulled into a spot on the first level and we got out of the car. The elevator was open, waiting for us.

  As we rode up Annie said, “Let’s make sure that one of us comes away with enough information to jumpstart an investigation. Why don’t I do patient records while you keep Shands and Pullaski occupied?”

  “You’ve got the list?”

  Annie nodded. She followed me across the lobby to the MRI lab entrance.

  “Just look like you know where you’re going,” I said.

  We walked into the waiting room. Apparently business had bounced back because there were about a half-dozen people there. The receptionist was on the phone. Without hesitating, I strode through, reached for the door to the inner area, and pulled it open.

  “Can I help you?” the receptionist said as we blew by. “Hey!”

  “It’s okay. Dr. Shands is expecting us,” I said. We were inside.

  We walked through the central area. One of the young men working at the counter looked up. His face registered confusion as he looked back and forth from Annie to me, not recognizing either of us.

  I nodded to him. “We were here visiting with Dr. Shands. I know the way.”

  In a moment we’d pushed through the double doors and were out of sight. We passed the room with the helium tanks and the brain bank. Now we were outside the records room. I had my hand poised over the keypad. Emily said the combination was Shands’s birthday. Please tell me they haven’t changed it. I punched in the numbers. The keypad beeped, and Annie opened the door.

  “Meet you at the car later, and remember to keep your head down,” Annie said, and slipped inside.

  26

  I BACK TRACKED to Shands’s office. The door was standing open. He wasn’t there, but his lab coat was thrown over the chair.

  I doubled back, past the records room again where I hoped Annie was already gathering the evidence we needed, then past the yellow sawhorse barriers. I paused outside the scan room. The door was closed and at first I couldn’t hear anything. I held my breath and listened. A woman’s voice was audible. Then the low rumble of a man.

  I went down the hall and let myself into the control room. Through the window I could see Dr. Pullaski and Shands in the scan room. They were locked in a struggle. Crouching, I approached the control console and switched on the speaker. “You have to…stop…can’t keep…” said Shands, his voice coming in tinny bursts.

  I hung back in the shadows of the darkened room and watched. Shands was trying to pull something away from Dr. Pullaski. Beside them was a patient in a wheelchair. The gray-haired woman in a hospital gown was whimpering and cringing.

  “I never…meant for you—” Shands wrenched an oxygen mask free of Dr. Pul
laski’s grasp and was backing away.

  “What on earth has come over you?” Dr. Pullaski said.

  Shands bent over the woman in the wheelchair. Hesitantly, he put his hand on her shoulder. It was an awkward gesture, as if he were trying out a dance step he’d never done before. He got down on one knee, steadied himself against the wheelchair, and lowered the other knee. The effect was clearly calming as the woman became less rigid and the mewling subsided.

  “Is she going to be all right?” Shands asked, looking up at Dr. Pullaski.

  “She’ll be fine, once you stop leaning on her.”

  “How many have there been?”

  Dr. Pullaski gazed at him steadily without answering.

  “How many?” he demanded.

  “You’re telling me you don’t know?”

  Shands staggered to his feet. “God help me. It’s true, isn’t it? What could you have been thinking? I’m a doctor. I don’t kill people.”

  “Of course you don’t.” Dr. Pullaski went up to him and put her hands on either side of his face. “Which is why you need me.” He pulled away. “Why you’ve always needed me. We’re the perfect partnership. That’s how we got all this. The most powerful magnet in any lab in the country. Patients clamoring to be included in your research.” Her voice turned hard. “Beautiful young research assistants. You can’t suddenly get cold feet. We have a bargain.”

  “Bargain? What the hell are you talking about?” Shands said.

  The patient gave a yelp of distress.

  Dr. Pullaski put her finger up to her lips. “Keep your voice down,” she told Shands, as if she were talking to a child. “Maybe you’ve forgotten that the girls come and go. I’m the constant, the one who keeps it all happening. Surely you know that after all these years. I do it for you. Because of the special relationship we have, that we’ve always—”

  “You’re out of your mind,” he said, cutting her off. The woman in the wheelchair started to mutter heatedly to herself. Shands dropped his voice. “I’ve tolerated you because you do your job better—”

  “Tolerated?”

  “You’re not an easy woman. With your petty jealousies.”

  “My what?”

  “Your fantasies about us.”

  Dr. Pullaski’s mouth dropped open. “Fantasies? You…need…me,” she said, biting off each word.

  “Like hell I do. You’ve endangered everything that means anything to me. I might have loved you once. But that was a long time ago. Now? How could I? You’re cold. You’re all dried up.”

  “You bastard.”

  “Bitch!”

  The woman in the wheelchair let loose with a long, protracted scream that sliced through the air.

  “Would you shut her the fuck up!” Shands yelled.

  The woman in the wheelchair flinched, shrinking down, bringing her chest to her knees. She began to screech, and the screech turned into a prolonged moaning that seemed to set the air vibrating. Dr. Pullaski tried shushing her, but to no avail. Now the woman was thrashing around. Any minute she’d have thrown herself out of the wheelchair.

  As Dr. Pullaski reached for the woman’s neck, I bolted for the door to the scan room and pulled it open. When she saw me Dr. Pullaski took a step back.

  The room fell silent, the only sound the patient in the wheelchair keening, her gray hair hanging over her face.

  Shands and Dr. Pullaski exchanged a look.

  “He knows,” Shands said.

  Dr. Pullaski absorbed the news without changing her expression. She smoothed her lab coat. Shands picked up the phone in the room, punched in a few numbers, and asked whoever answered to send someone down to get the patient. A few moments later one of the men I’d seen working in the lab came and took her away.

  Dr. Pullaski began wheeling the oxygen tank to the door.

  “You aren’t very fond of Dr. Ryan, are you, Dr. Pullaski?” I said.

  She paused, an amused expression passing over her face. “Should’ve thrown that one back.”

  “And why was that?”

  Dr. Pullaski set the pushcart upright and gave me a direct look. “She—”

  “Estelle,” Shands said, a warning in his voice.

  “You’re not only an able administrator who keeps this place humming and the money flowing in, are you?” I said. “You keep the young women flowing in as well. You hire them knowing full well what’s going to happen. One after another, they get seduced by the good doctor. They get chewed up and spit out. They come and they go, but you’re still here, the irreplaceable helpmate. Only you made a little mistake with Dr. Ryan.”

  “Me? Oh no, I never would have hired that one. She applied”—she paused—“directly to you, James, didn’t she?” Dr. Pullaski’s thin smile turned into a sneer. “Oh, she knew how to appeal. How to make you stand up and take notice. Little Miss Innocent. Then she wouldn’t have you, would she?”

  “She would have, if it weren’t for your…your interfering,” Shands sputtered. “Besides, she’s different.”

  “You think so?” She shot Shands a pitying look. “Ambition. That’s what that girl’s about. That’s what they’re all about, really. She’d have made love to me if it had gotten her what she wanted. All she’s done is distract you from the important work. It was pathetic, really. The way you followed her—”

  “I think you’ve said quite enough,” Shands said.

  “You just couldn’t take no for an answer, could you?”

  So I’d been right in my first impression of Philbrick—odd, intense, socially awkward, but not a stalker. Now I recalled the undercurrent of anxiety I’d felt from Shands when he’d asked if I’d seen anything the night I’d found Emily terrified in the parking lot at the Pearce. His obvious relief had been because I hadn’t seen him. Shands was obsessed with Emily, all right, the woman who’d pose for Playboy but wouldn’t fall into bed with him.

  Had something changed? When had Shands turned from pursuer to executioner? The fabric heart and the pages from Playboy had been planted in the desk to make Philbrick look like the stalker—and to give Emily a motive for murder. Emily’s earring and her “Freudian Slips” had been planted by the same person who ran Kyle down with her car. It would have been easy to take Emily’s car keys, her apartment keys from her bag while she was working at the lab, have copies made, and then return them before she knew they were missing.

  But Philbrick’s and Kyle’s deaths weren’t about stalking. That was just a convenient ruse to divert attention from the real reason they were killed.

  “I ran into one of the doctors who served on the board with you at the Cambridge Brain Bank,” I said. Now I had both of their attention. “You both left at the same time, didn’t you? Why was that? One too many complaints from young women? Too much research funding vanishing from other budget lines and showing up on yours?”

  Dr. Pullaski and Shands exchanged a look. In that instant they’d morphed from adversaries to allies.

  “We didn’t belong there,” Shands said. “It was too conservative, stodgy. Our research was…is…light-years ahead of theirs.”

  “So why haven’t you published it? Why not let the world know about the radical, groundbreaking work that’s going on here?”

  Together they presented me with an impassive wall.

  Now I spoke directly to Shands. “It’s not just women that you collect, is it? You need brains to feed your research, and you need a lot of them because whatever you’re doing, it causes the tissue structure to break down. And time is of the essence, isn’t it? Who knows how long before you start to feel the effects of the disease yourself?”

  “Shut up!” Shands roared. “You know nothing.”

  The room fell into silence, the only sound the humming of the overhead fluorescent lighting and an occasional clicking from the scanner. It had been twenty minutes since I left Annie.

  “This has been an interesting discussion, but I’m afraid we have work to do,” Dr. Pullaski said, busying herself straighteni
ng the room. “We have a full schedule today, and there are patients waiting to be tested.”

  She removed the paper covering the scanner table, threw it away, and tore off a fresh sheet from a roll under the counter. She placed it on the table and smoothed it in place. She began to wheel the pushcart holding the oxygen canister from the room. I started to follow, but Shands put his hand on my arm, holding me back. The door swung shut behind her.

  “You have to believe me, I had no idea,” Shands said. “She must be insane. She set Emily up.”

  “The police will have to be told,” I said.

  “Isn’t there some other way?” Shands said, sinking down onto a stool. “Think of all my work. The benefits to mankind. There are four million people in this country alone with dementia. Think of the quality of life lost.” His tunnel vision took my breath away. Not a moment spent pondering the patients who’d been killed, never mind Leonard Philbrick and Kyle Ronan. “You understand how important it is, don’t you? There has to be a way to save it.”

  I thought about the brains, stuck with electrodes like cloves in so many Christmas hams, dissolving in whatever he had them suspended in. Was that research worth saving, or the quest of a madman intent on only one thing—saving himself?

  “She can be very jealous, you know,” Shands continued. “A brilliant administrator. Seemed like early on, when we were just getting started, she could just about pull money out of the air.” He seemed to settle into a kind of reverie. “I remember the first time I saw her. That dark hair, flashing eyes. She wasn’t pretty, but she had a kind of electricity about her. Raw power.

  “Now she’s turned into something else. Something ugly. I’ve kept her on because she’s made herself”—he paused, looking for the word—“indispensable.”

  Over Shands’s shoulder I could see Dr. Pullaski had entered the control room. She was staring at Shands’s back, listening.

  “I don’t think you should—” I began, putting up my hand to silence him.

  “I’ve already laid the groundwork. A deal that will make the lab financially independent and free me of her—”