Of course.
The day Christianson had been allowed to look around Pennell’s lab and office he must have checked the answering machine. All the notebooks and computer files dealing with Pennell’s project had been removed, but Bruxton had never thought about the answering machine. He really was losing it. But he was still more than a match for this oaf.
“When Henry didn’t answer, I thought he might have gone home. After the guard said he was still around, I figured the message I left at the gate was enough. Now I really have some things to do.”
“Sure, okay,” Otto said, getting up. “Thanks for seeing me.”
After Christianson was shown out, Bruxton reviewed their conversation. He couldn’t find any fault in his performance, but it bothered him to be questioned. Finally, he decided that Christianson hadn’t come there because of any suspicions. The man was just blundering around trying to act like a cop. He thought of the fat fool looking right at the white van that had been by the front door. He’d no doubt been curious about it, but couldn’t have any idea what it meant. But one day he’d certainly be aware of the results.
Bruxton got up and walked to the double doors that led to his picture gallery. He went inside, turned on the lights, and paid quiet homage to the evidence of genius on his walls, knowing that now he could keep the entire collection until he drew his last breath and it would never betray him.
At the end of Bruxton’s driveway, as Otto waited for the big gates to let him out, he decided he didn’t like Zane Bruxton much. All that talk about appointments and not just dropping in. In his experience the only people who get upset when you just knock on their door are folks who have a messy house or something to hide. And Bruxton’s place sure looked clean.
23
THE BRAIN SOUP Jessie had taken from the buried carcass created certain problems for her. It was surely loaded with bacteria as well as numerous toxins they had produced. She couldn’t inject something like that into a test animal. After some thought about how to clean it up, she decided on a simple approach. She’d autoclave it—heat it to sterilizing temperature. This would not only kill the bacteria but likely inactivate any toxins. The neatest part of this approach was that prions were known to be resistant to autoclaving, so that if the injections gave a positive response, it not only would prove that the suspect animal was the source of the disease, but at the same time would implicate prions as the infectious particle.
Since very little of the soup would be required for her experiment, she autoclaved only a small portion of what she’d collected. After what happened to her first set of animals, she stayed close to the autoclave for its full cycle to make sure that what she put in was what came out. And she kept the rest of the soup nearby on ice.
When the autoclaved sample had cooled, she concentrated it to make sure there would be as many prions as possible in the tiny amount she would inject into each animal. At the end of the day, she left work with all the tubes of the sample material and everything she’d need to test it packed in her briefcase.
On the way home, Jessie stopped at the grocery and picked up two bags of frozen corn, two of green beans, and a roll of magic tape. She then drove to Shell’s hardware for some plastic sheeting.
Upon arriving home, she carried everything to the back yard where Fitzhugh, her black Labrador, came bounding out of his igloo-shaped doghouse to see her. Though she was eager to get upstairs to the garage apartment and start work, she took Fitzie off his chain and played Frisbee with him for a while. She then hooked him back up and gave him his dinner from a bag of Ol’ Roy in the garage. Free now to pursue her own interests, she picked up her briefcase and the things she’d bought and went up the wooden stairs to the garage apartment.
Earlier that afternoon, as she’d prepared the sample for testing, she’d been worried that Richard might call her at work and tell her he had the animals she’d need. Considering that the phones there probably weren’t secure, that could have been a mistake. To his credit, he hadn’t called. However, that meant she didn’t even know if he was back yet from Madison. But as she went inside, she saw eight small cages on the floor by the dishwasher.
RICHARD HAD DROPPED the mice and cages off at Jessie’s apartment around four forty-five. He’d then gone back to his office and proofed the report he’d been trying to get finished for the health department. He’d briefly considered adding the events that had unfolded today, but decided to file that in an update after he had the results of the tests Jessie would do at home. He faxed the report to the department at five-ten, then went to his car and headed for Jessie’s house.
Turning into her driveway now, he saw that she was already home. He pulled in behind her car, got out, and walked toward the backyard.
Even before he came around the corner of the house, Fitzie shifted to alert status. At the first visual sign of Richard, the dog went on a barking tear. Why the animal had never learned to accept him was a mystery.
“Hush, Fitzie. It’s me, remember?”
The noise brought Jessie out of the garage apartment to see what was going on. “Richard. Stop bothering the dog.”
“Does he bark at Artie like this?” Richard said, starting up the stairs.
“He loves Artie.”
“The dog is confused.”
“You’re just in time to give me a hand.”
“You can’t request applause,” Richard said. “It has to be spontaneous.”
“Come in here and spontaneously help me rig an operation tent.”
Inside, after Jessie described what she had in mind for the plastic sheeting she’d bought, they draped it over the Formica-topped kitchen table. Richard pulled the plastic up in the center and twisted it so they had a tongue Jessie could tie to the hanging light fixture directly overhead. She cut a slit in the side of the tent for access, then lightly misted the inside with alcohol. She also gave the table an alcohol wipedown.
“It’s probably not a sterile field,” she said, surveying their work. “But it has to be better than operating without any precautions.”
Within an hour, eight animals had been injected with the prepared sample and eight with saline.
“Where’s the rest of the material we collected from that carcass?” Richard asked.
“In the fridge.”
“I don’t think we should leave it there.”
“At least not right out in the open.”
“What do you mean?”
Jessie got the samples from the fridge along with the frozen vegetables she’d bought. She went to the countertop near the sink and laid it all out. She banged a bag of vegetables on the edge of the sink to loosen the contents. With the scissors she’d used to slit the plastic tent, she made a small cut in the end of the bag, then slipped one tube of the brain soup inside. She did the same with the other two bags. The last bag also received the small tube of autoclaved sample. She put this bag in the freezer then explained the rest of her plan.
“One of those other bags goes in my freezer in the house. The third, you’re taking home. That last tube, I’m going to bury in the yard. Okay?”
“I can’t think of any better way to hide them.”
“Now let’s fix the cages.” To show Richard what she meant, Jessie went to the cages and put one on the countertop. She bent over next to the cage and ruffled her hair with her fingers. She then cut a small piece from the roll of magic tape she’d bought and used it to pick up one of the hairs she’d shed. She taped that end of the hair to the cage and secured the other end to the lid.
“I get it,” Richard said. “If anyone opens the cage, the hair will break and we’ll know the animals have been tampered with.”
Working together, they spent the next few minutes rigging the other cages. When they were finished, Jessie took a last look around and said, “That’s all we can do up here. Let’s bury that
last tube, move Fitzie to the foot of the stairs, and drop your bag of veggies off. Then let’s get something to eat.”
After dinner, Jessie checked on the animals and found that they’d all recovered from the anesthetic and were acting like mice should. She took a quick look Saturday morning, another that afternoon, and again that evening. Each time she went to the apartment, she made sure all the hairs they’d rigged on the cages were still intact. After each visit, she called Richard and gave him a report.
There was no way to predict how long a latent period there might be before the animals showed any symptoms. In the three people who had died, their seizures had appeared about two months after eating the suspect beef. But ingestion of prions was known to produce a much longer latent period than direct introduction into the brain. Of course, she wasn’t working with humans. The whole time course could be different for mice. Or they might even be refractory to this strain of prion. This last possibility was one Jessie tried not to think about.
The mice looked fine all day Sunday and were still that way on Monday morning. That afternoon Jessie ran into Bruxton in the hall.
“Hello, Jessie. How’s that new project going?”
The only new project she was involved with was the prion testing. So he had to mean that. It was the first time she’d seen him since discovering that her animals at work had been replaced. This made her look for any hint to suggest he already knew the answer to his question. But his manner and expression conveyed only sincerity.
“Nothing yet,” she said.
“Well, it’s only been a few days.”
“That’s true.”
“You let me know if anything develops.”
“Yessir, I certainly will.”
Bruxton had seemed so confident that Jessie began to wonder if he knew about the second set of animals and had somehow compromised them.
He couldn’t have . . . The hairs were all intact. And Fitzie would never let a stranger up those stairs. These arguments should have given her comfort, but they didn’t. So when she left work for the day, she wanted to get to the apartment and take a really hard look at everything. She gave this such a high priority, she hurried past Fitzie with just a quick pat on the head and dashed up the stairs.
Key in the lock . . . and she was inside.
She flicked on the lights and surveyed the kitchen. The cages were on the floor lined up along the cabinets just as she’d left them. And there was a feeling of undisturbed continuity in the room. Of course, when the final note of a piano concerto fades, who can tell when the instrument was last played?
The cages were arranged so that the one nearest the door and the next three held saline-injected animals. All these mice were normal, just as they should be.
The short interval since she’d begun this test, along with her concern that someone might have tampered with the experiment, led her to believe that the animals injected with brain soup would likewise be fine. But this time, her expectations were turned upside down.
In the first cage beyond those that held the saline control animals, one mouse was lying immobile on its side. The other was in the corner having a seizure.
24
“THEY’RE ALL SICK,” Richard said, checking the last cage. “I need to call the health department.”
“It’s almost six o’clock,” Jessie said. “No one will be there.”
“Probably not, but I should try.”
As Jessie predicted, he got only a recording, reciting the department’s regular business hours.
“Nobody home,” Richard said. “But they need to know about this as soon as possible. I’ve got to get back to the office and write an addendum to my original report. What are these results going to do to your relationship with Bruxton? If he was behind the animal switch at work, what’s he going to think when it gets back to him that you got positive results from a second set of animals? Won’t that tell him you know what he did?”
“He asked me to keep him informed. So I’ll tell him about the results myself. I just won’t mention the second experiment. If he was involved in the switch, he won’t dare let on that he knows the first animals couldn’t be sick. He might even think whoever was supposed to make the switch screwed up somehow. Let him wonder what happened. If he wasn’t involved, the issue of two sets of animals is irrelevant.”
“HELLO, DOCTOR PATTERSON, this is Richard Heflin. Hope I’m not bothering you, but I was hoping you could give me an update on how the department is handling that situation here in Midland.” He hit the button for speakerphone so Jessie could hear.
After leaving Jessie the night the animals became ill, Richard had spent the evening writing up a detailed addendum to his original report to the health department, omitting any reference to the interference they’d encountered with their first experiments. Expecting that the department would want to take possession of the carcass on Buck Lundval’s property, and believing that Lundval might mislead them about its location, he included a description of exactly where to dig. He’d faxed the report as soon as he’d finished so it would be there whenever the director arrived for work the next day. To make sure she was aware of it, he’d called her yesterday morning and learned she was just moments away from starting on it. Enough time had now elapsed for them to have taken some action.
“We picked up the carcass of the infected animal yesterday and all the dirt that had soaked up blood,” Patterson said. “Mr. Lundval didn’t seem happy to see us.”
“I’m not surprised,” Richard said. “Have you sent someone to the dairy?”
“I talked to the manager, Mr. Lamotte, by phone and he said that animal was killed because it had a seizure. They intended to incinerate the remains on the premises, but their incinerator was broken. Rather than consulting with his superiors about disposal, the employee who killed the beast called Premier Industries to take it away. He apparently didn’t make it clear to their driver that it was a sick animal. The important thing is, they haven’t had any other cases. So it was just a sporadic incident.”
“What about the milk the sick cow produced?”
“It was in a dry cycle and hadn’t been in production for several months. Even in England, where they’ve had such a problem with mad cow disease, there was never any indication it could be transmitted to humans in milk. Besides, any milk that cow produced has long ago been consumed. So there’s nothing to recall. In your three patients, the latent period was only two months. If there had been any contamination in milk from the dairy, we should have seen some additional cases by now. So I believe we’re in the clear.”
“You don’t think their herd should be inspected?”
“As I said, it was an isolated incident.”
Richard persisted. “You know this is a very aggressive and very different prion strain than anything previously known.”
“That’s very clear.”
“So isn’t it possible that there are some other cows out there in the early stages of prion recruitment that might be showing no signs of disease but be dumping abnormal prions into their milk?”
“That apparently didn’t happen with the index animal.”
Trying to keep his feeling of exasperation out of his voice, Richard said, “Who knows why that was true?”
“What makes you think other animals at the dairy might be ill? Prion diseases aren’t contagious.”
“I don’t know what caused the index animal to get sick. Maybe it was an isolated incident, maybe not. I just think a thorough investigation is warranted.”
“I appreciate your concern, Doctor Heflin. But our resources here are already spread thin. And I just don’t feel that we can waste them on pursuing this. Again, thank you for keeping us so well informed.”
Then she was gone.
Richard hung up and looked at Jessie. “I can’t believe they’re trea
ting this so casually.”
“It could just be bureaucratic ineptitude,” she said. “. . . or something more.”
“You think whoever was behind the animal switch got to them?”
“It would have to be someone with a lot of influence.”
“Bruxton.”
“He’s the obvious choice.”
“If it is him, he must have some connection with the dairy.”
“Maybe he owns it. That would explain his involvement in the animal switch. He didn’t want us to discover they had a sick cow out there because of the bad publicity. If people knew about that, they’d stop buying the dairy’s milk.”
“That wouldn’t hurt him. Compared to his take from Vasostasin, the amount of money the dairy’s making has to be insignificant. It either isn’t Bruxton, or the dairy is important for some other reason.”
“It has to be Bruxton.”
“What the hell is going on out there?”
Then, a seed that had been germinating a couple of inches below conscious thought in Richard’s brain pushed to the surface. “That woman . . . Holly Fisher . . . the one who was run off the road. Otto said her seat belt looked as though it had been cut, and that just before her accident she was in the Lucy II asking a couple of guys who work at the dairy a lot of questions about the place. I wonder what that was all about?”
“Call and ask her.”
Richard reached for the phone and punched in the number for hospital records to find out what contact numbers Holly had given them.
AFTER COPIES OF Hustler magazine had been found in the rooms of several boys at St. Peter’s Orphanage in Mission Viejo, California, Father Lucius Graham had scheduled an assembly for the next afternoon, at which he spoke for forty-five minutes on the dangers of impure thoughts and masturbation. Returning now to his office after the assembly, his secretary informed him that the mail was on his desk.
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, Mrs. Lang, could you make me a cup of tea? I believe I strained my voice speaking to the boys.”
The Lethal Helix Page 20
