Fatal Reaction

by Hartzmark, Gini

  “We’ll just be another couple of minutes,” replied Stephen.

  “I’ve just come from the medical examiner’s office...” I ventured.

  “I’m sorry, Michelle,” said Stephen, turning to the crystallographer. “I’ll stop down in the modeling room for that reprint. We can finish up then.”

  For a minute I thought she hadn’t heard him, but finally she rose to her feet. She was a tall woman, with the blocky, squared-off gait of a triathlete. Michelle’s physical assurance stood in strange contrast to her abrupt social mannerisms. Whenever I saw her outside of her lab I got the sense that she felt most at home in the computergenerated world of crystallography and she was eager to get back to it as soon as she could.

  “What did the medical examiner want?” demanded Stephen, as soon as the door had closed behind Michelle.

  “You, actually. Julia Gordon and I were both trying to reach you last night. Where were you?”

  “I was going over our results on Hemasyn with Gus Sandstrom and a couple of the other senior investigators. We worked all night getting them ready to send to the FDA.”

  “I tried you at the office.”

  “We were upstairs in the hematology conference room. I must have forgotten to switch my line over. What did Julia Gordon want?”

  “She wanted you to have a look at these.” I took the photographs out of my briefcase and handed them to Stephen. While he studied them I sat down in the chair Michelle Goodwin had just vacated. It still felt warm. “What am I looking at?”

  “They’re photographs of kidney tissue taken under the microscope.”

  “Why does Julia want me to look at photomicrographs?”

  “It wasn’t Julia Gordon who suggested that you look at them. It was her husband.”

  “Why?” he asked, looking closely at the photographs for the first time. “What could I possibly tell Hugh about kidney tissue? Why are there all these thrombi in the small blood vessels?”

  “That’s the question. Is there anything at Azor that could have caused that kind of clotting?”

  He looked up and his eyes met mine. I saw the weariness in his face and my heart went out to him. As much as he hated to admit it, Danny’s death, his high-wire act with the Japanese, the dissension on the board—they were all taking their toll.

  “PAF would do this,” he said, quietly.

  “What’s PAF?”

  “Platelet activating factor. It’s a powerful procoagulant. They use it upstairs in the Hemasyn labs as a control in clotting studies. But you didn’t tell me where the tissue in this photograph came from.”

  “It was taken from Danny.”

  Stephen dropped the photograph onto the surface of his desk and leaned back in his chair as if trying to get some distance.

  “Is there some way to test for this PAF stuff?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t think so. PAF is metabolized by the body almost instantaneously. It disappears without a trace.”

  “So how does it work? What does it do?”

  “Just like the name says, it’s a powerful enzyme that makes blood clot, especially in the very high concentrations we use in our labs. Even a tiny dose injected into a person would cause almost immediate D.I.C. The PAF causes the body’s clotting mechanisms to spring into action, which is why you’d see all that microscopic evidence of clotting in the tissues.”

  “But then why would you bleed to death?” I demanded. “Wouldn’t all your blood just clot?”

  “No. The body’s clotting mechanisms, the platelets and proteins that cause the blood to clot, aren’t sufficient for the body’s entire blood supply. Once they’re exhausted— which would happen almost instantaneously with PAF— the remaining blood wouldn’t clot at all.”

  “So tell me, if Danny hadn’t had a perforated ulcer, would the PAF have killed him?”

  “Most definitely, but in that case he would have bled to death internally. Compared to what went on in that apartment it would have been a relatively quiet, comfortable death. He might not even have known what was happening to him.”

  “Are there other substances that could do the same thing besides PAF?”

  “Maybe some of the more conventional anticoagulant drugs at very high doses....”

  “How many people in the company have knowledge about this PAF stuff?”

  “I should think just about everybody, especially after what happened in the animal labs this summer.”

  “What happened?”

  “I can’t believe I didn’t tell you. You must have been out of town. One of our summer interns, a college kid from the University of Illinois who should have at least been able to read English, was supposed to mix twenty-five ccs of profluralkynase, an animal sedative commonly known as PFA, into the drinking water of the twenty-five rabbits about to be tested in the AZU-90 protocol. He was either dyslexic or in a hurry, because when he went into the supply room he grabbed the bottle of PAF off the shelf and mixed it with the water.”

  “What happened to the rabbits?” I asked.

  “They all bled to death.”

  When I got back to Danny’s office the phone was ringing. It was Cheryl, sounding uncharacteristically ruffled.

  “Who told your mother she could buy a fax machine?” she demanded without so much as a hello. “She keeps sending me these memos about things she wants me to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “This morning when I got in she faxed me a list of twenty-eight florists that she wants me to call. I’m not exaggerating. She wants to see if they can get some type of orchid whose name I can’t even pronounce. She claims it’s for these Japanese businessmen who are coming next week, but I’m beginning to think I’m in some kind of Martha Stewart nightmare and I just can’t Wake myself wake up.”

  “What can I say except that you’re going to go straight to heaven for this?” I replied. “What else is going on today?”

  “So far nothing urgent. I’m just about to fax you your phone messages and I have a messenger on his way with some things for you to sign. Oh, and someone named Mimi Sheraton just called. She’s got to be a friend of your mother’s. How come they all talk like that?”

  “I think they wire their jaws shut their last year of finishing school. Not only does it make them very thin, but it teaches them how to talk while clenching their teeth.”

  “Ms. Sheraton says to tell you she’s arranged for the structural engineers to come and look at the apartment this afternoon and she thinks it would be good if either you or Stephen would be there.”

  “Call her back and tell her she can either handle it herself or reschedule for after the Takisawa visit. You might also tactfully suggest that in the future she check with you before she schedules anything.”

  “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but why do you need a structural engineer?”

  “Nothing really. It’s just that the ceilings are all falling down.”

  “You don’t think this is some kind of sign, do you?”

  “No, I do not,” I replied promptly. “Have I already asked you yet whether you want to work this weekend?”

  “No. Do I?”

  “I’m desperate.”

  “How desperate?”

  “Time and a half and as many suits as you need when you start interviewing.”

  “I guess if you twist my arm…” replied my secretary, sounding pleased. Clothes gave her a kind of pleasure I could never understand. “But you have to promise me one thing.”

  “What’s that.”

  “You’re not going to make me call florists or make up seating charts.”

  I hung up the phone and tried to settle down to work, but I couldn’t concentrate. All I could think about was PAF. Stephen had said it was kept out in the open in the hematology labs upstairs, but there was also a quantity stored in the reagent room in the basement, which was adjacent to the animal labs. According to Stephen the reagent room was in such constant use that it was kept unlocked during the day.

  T
oo restless to settle down to the tasks before me I decided to pay a call on Carl Woodruff.

  I found the project coordinator in his office, sitting behind his desk and methodically working the length of white cord that hung from his Venetian blinds into a professional-looking noose.

  “Shall I call the local suicide prevention hot line?” I inquired.

  “Just practicing,” he replied brightly, and began unraveling it. “Besides, it’s not for me.”

  “So tell me,” I ventured, “who are you fitting for a noose?”

  “Michael Childress, who else?”

  “Who else, indeed. What has he done this time?”

  “I went down to the modeling room this morning to talk about what he’s going to have to do to get ready for the electrical shutdown over the weekend. Naturally, he handed me a long list of things to be done and immediately announced that of course he would not be available to do any of it himself. He’s leaving for Boston on Friday for some conference so he expects Michelle and me to get the crystallography labs ready. I also had the nerve to mention that I needed the radiation logs for crystallography before he leaves.”

  “What are radiation logs?”

  “Every employee who works in an area where they may be exposed to radiation wears one of these little red devices clipped to their ID card.”

  Carl pulled his card off his belt and handed it to me. The device was a red rectangle about two inches long and half an inch wide attached to his ID.

  “It measures the amount of radiation you’ve been exposed to. Everybody in the crystallography lab is required by the EPA and OSHA to wear one. The radiation levels have to be recorded once a week and we have to submit the readings to the government or we’re slapped with a fine.

  “Naturally Childress considers himself above government regulation. How could he be expected to be bothered with something as trivial as keeping track of how much hazardous radiation people in his department are exposed to? At Baxter they had people who did that for you. Scientists were not expected to clutter their craniums with such trivia. Oh god, how I miss Danny.”

  “Why Danny?”

  “While Danny was alive Childress complained to him.”

  “Why? Were they friends?”

  “Are you kidding? Danny hated Childress’s guts.”

  “Why?” I asked. This was hardly the answer I had expected.

  “Because Childress is a complete tick. He was always sauntering into Danny’s office with some grievance that he insisted was a breach of his employment contract.”

  “What kind of things did he complain about?”

  “Important stuff—his office was too small, he insisted on flying first-class but accounting would only reimburse him for coach. The man is a first-class pain in the ass.”

  “Why didn’t he come to you with these complaints? As the project administrator I’d think you’d be the natural one to go to.”

  “I think he just liked going over my head and Danny was gracious enough to put up with it.”

  “Speaking of Danny,” I said, trying to sound casual, “did he try to get in touch with you at all when he got back from Tokyo? I found a note he’d made to call you, but I couldn’t tell whether he ever managed to get in touch.”

  “He phoned me the day he got back,” replied Woodruff easily. “He left a message on my voice mail that he wanted to have a look at the files I had on the integrase project. Normally I’m in all day on Saturday, but my wife’s parents were visiting that weekend, so I didn’t find out he’d called until Monday. It’s strange to think that by the time I got the message he must have been dead.”

  “Was there anybody from the company who Danny was friends with outside of work?”

  If Carl thought my question strange he didn’t show it. instead he thought for a minute. “It’s hard to say, really. Over the years the projects change, people come and go. Danny was always in a funny position. As you have no doubt noticed some of the labs can be quite close-knit. It always depends on which project was taking a lot of his time. A couple of years back, when the company was going flat out to develop a new antirejection drug for transplant patients, he got real friendly with a molecular chemist named Gregg Waskowitz. But Gregg’s been back at M.I.T. for a couple years....”

  “What about recently?”

  “These days Danny was working almost full time on finding funding sources for ZK-501 so those were the people he had the most interaction with. But really he didn’t seem particularly close to anybody. He occasionally liked to go to Remminger’s lab and give her a hard time, but I don’t know whether they ever got together outside of the office. Every once in a while I’d see Michelle in his office, but I think they were just commiserating about Childress. I must say I’m beginning to acquire a renewed understanding of what that poor woman has to put up with working in the same lab as that man.”

  “Was there anybody besides Childress that Danny didn’t get along with?”

  “You knew Danny, he got along with everybody. But even though he never said much about it, I know he didn’t really care for Dave Borland,” replied Carl. “The two of them never got along.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Part of it was just personality. Danny liked opera and art galleries. You’ve spent time with Borland. He’s an unrepentant barbarian. His idea of a good time is sitting around in his underwear drinking beer.”

  “There has to be more to it than that,” I protested. “There is. You must remember that EEOC suit we had last year.”

  “I remember. There was a technician in Borland’s lab who claimed that he had made unwanted sexual advances. It was settled as I recall.”

  “Yes, but not before Danny and Borland got into more than one screaming match. From what I gather there was never any question that Borland had behaved improperly—hell, he bragged about it. Borland announced to everyone when he hired her that he was going to have some fun with her. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three—pretty, but not what I’d call spectacular.”

  “As I recall she initially went to Danny and complained that Borland was making off-color jokes, sexual references, and I believe the odd pat on the fanny.”

  “Borland’s that kind of guy.”

  “You can be that kind of guy at home, but not at work,” I said. “According to Danny, when the woman first came to him she had no intention of filing a lawsuit.”

  “She just wanted him to stop.”

  “That’s usually all anyone wants.”

  “Unfortunately, Borland either couldn’t or wouldn’t. He never understood why what he was doing was wrong. He used to brag that the girl had a secret crush on him and was making it all up.”

  “And so she sued,” I said. “As I recall, we ended up settling for three years’ salary. Stephen was furious.”

  “So was Danny. He thought Borland had behaved badly and it had cost the company a bunch of money, money that should have been spent on science.”

  “He was right.”

  “I know. But I’m just telling you. From that point on there was nothing but bad blood between them.”

  CHAPTER 19

  As I left Carl Woodruff’s office I decided to make a trip downstairs to have a look at the reagent room where the PAF was stored. I found it without difficulty, a small win-dowless storage room behind a door marked “Reagent Supply.” The room was lined with shelves and crammed with boxes and bottles of all sizes. When I had expressed my surprise that a storeroom that held a substance as lethal as PAF was kept unlocked, Stephen had countered that Azor was a pharmaceutical company, not a kindergarten. Scanning the labels on the various bottles and jars that bulged from the shelves, I suspected almost everything in there could kill you.

  As I walked past the modeling room I saw Michael Childress through the plate-glass window. He was sitting on a high stool looking down the double barrel of a large microscope. Through the open door I could hear Mozart playing softly in the background. Childress looke
d for all the world like he belonged in one of the those sappy pharmaceutical industry ads.

  “Excuse me, Dr. Childress,” I said, on impulse.

  “Don’t bother me,” he said, without even so much as looking up to see who was speaking. I stayed where I was.

  “What the hell do you want?” he demanded, looking up from what he was doing.

  “I wanted to ask you a question.”

  “I don’t have time for your questions.”

  “This will take only a minute,” I replied, his rudeness making me determined.

  “I don’t have a minute,” he snapped, going back to whatever he was looking at under the scope.

  “As it happens, this is the only minute I have,” I replied icily, “so I’m afraid you’re going to have to stop what you’re doing.”

  “Who do you think you are?” He was really angry now, but then again, so was I.

  “I’m Kate Millholland,” I said. “I’m this company’s chief legal counsel and a member of the board of directors. That means I vote to approve your lab budget and decide whether or not to pay you your salary.”

  “What is your question?” he asked with the same mixture of hubris and hostility that I remembered all too well from my professors in law school.

  “I was wondering what you called Danny Wohl about at home the day after he returned from Japan.”

  “What?” At least I’d finally managed to get his attention. “You called him on the Sunday he came back from Tokyo,” I said. “I was just wondering whether you wouldn’t mind telling me what the two of you discussed.”

  “Nothing. I never called him.”

  “Are you sure? Perhaps it was a personal call?” I suggested.

  “I’m telling you we never spoke.”

  “That’s strange because the police have copies of Danny’s phone records and there was a call made from your number to Danny’s apartment the morning of his death.”

  “There must be some kind of error in the records then.”

  “Not likely. Perhaps you’ve just forgotten....”

  “I assure you I have an excellent memory,” he interjected huffily. “The last time I spoke to Danny was before he left for Japan.”