Dust to Dust

by James M. Thompson

  He craned his neck to look back at her. “Then, how did they afford to send their daughter to college and medical school if they were so poor?”

  “They didn’t, Burton. Word is, Kaitlyn joined the navy and paid them back two years for every year of college and medical school she attended. That’s why she is just getting started in her research career, even though she’s in her mid-forties.”

  With that, she gave him an extra-tight squeeze on his shoulders.

  He moaned a little. “Right there, don’t stop,” and then he continued his thought. “Well, maybe I did misjudge her if that’s the case. But it’s weird that she did that to me ’cause I’d finally begun to respect her—although only just a little,” he hastened to add before she got the idea he’d gone soft. “She’s got a lot of pluck, and in the monthly meetings she’s never kowtowed to Captain Sunshine and she gave him back as good as she got.”

  “Uh-huh, kinda like me, huh?”

  He turned to look at her with a hurt look on his face. “You do know I really do respect and admire your gumption and drive, don’t you?”

  “You didn’t hate her, Burton. You don’t really hate anybody. But you’ve been playing this game so long you’re starting to get confused. I know you didn’t move out because I’m an MD. You moved out because you insisted on paying the rent and you couldn’t afford it. It was my fault. I should never have picked this place out while knowing how you are. But I thought that since we loved each other, our money was communal and that we could afford this place with both our salaries. But never mind. As soon as the lease is up, we’ll live wherever you say. In a Motel Six if that will make you happy.”

  It was a dark night, and toward the east, storm clouds were rolling in. Now and then through the wall of windows they could see a thrust of lightning zigzag its way through the black clouds. He smiled. “My girl, very shortly, we will not have to worry about money. I am going to make us very, very rich.”

  “You keep talking about that. This doesn’t have anything to do with all those trips you’ve been making to Mexico, does it?”

  “Better brush on up your Spanish, my girl.”

  “Oh no. I’ve no intention of living in Mexico.”

  “Wherever I goest and all that. Says so right there in the Bible.”

  “It’s a woman who says that. Ruth. And she says, ‘Whither thou goest.’ And I’m not saying, ‘Wherever thou goest to Mexico.’ Listen, why do you have to be such a bastard? If you can help Dr. Williams, why don’t you just do it? You would be surprised how painless it is to be nice for a change.”

  He shook his head. “Oh no. Not on this. I’m not showing this serum to anyone except somebody with a check in hand that’s got a lot of zeros on it. A whole lot of zeros.”

  She heard the fervor in his voice and grabbed him by his short-cropped hair and pulled his head back so she could see his face. “Have you got something good, Ramsey? Something really good? Important?”

  He smiled as well as he could, considering the position his head was in. “More important than you could believe.”

  “Are you still working on the serum to improve the dialysis machines?”

  He answered, “Have I told you any different?”

  She looked closely at him. “Why do I have the feeling that the laboratory you are contracted to, BioTech, may have to read about this in the newspapers?”

  His eyebrows raised. “Because you have a suspicious mind?”

  She let go of his hair. “You’ll never get away with stealing the formula from BioTech and selling it as your own. It’s been tried before by people greedier than you and it hasn’t worked. You may be a hell of a researcher, Burton, but a lawyer you most definitely are not, and it’s lawyers who draw up those contracts, and it’s lawyers who make them stick.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

  “And then there’s that satellite office business. Conroe, isn’t it? I know you’ve been paying rent on another office there. What is that all about?”

  He got up from the floor, lay down on the couch, and put his head in her lap. “How do you know about Conroe? What have you been doing? Snooping?”

  “Ramsey, I balance your checkbook.”

  “Why do you do that?”

  “Because you like to pretend to be the absentminded professor type.”

  “Oh yes. I forgot.” He was examining her breast, massaging the nice large nipple through the thin material of her silk dress.

  She was very conscious of his roving fingers. “Plus, you can’t add or subtract. Which makes it difficult to balance a checkbook.”

  “Well, BioTech is welcome to everything they find at Conroe. And it won’t be insignificant, I can assure you that. They’ll feel very lucky they caught me cheating and very fortunate to have had an association with the eminent blood man, Burton Ramsey, Ph.D.”

  “But they aren’t going to get the real goods, is that the idea?”

  He continued playing with her breast. “Now you are getting the idea, sweetie.”

  “Meanwhile, after having dazzled them with your footwork, you are going to steal quietly off into the dark in Mexico with the sho’ ’nough stuff.”

  “There ya go. And nobody the wiser.”

  “Bullshit, Ramsey. You won’t fool the lawyers at BioTech any more than you fooled me with that dinner.”

  He raised his head off her lap and gave her a hard look. “What’s that supposed to mean? You trying to start a scene?”

  “Ramsey, a scene is what you do in front of other people. You’re thinking of a fight.”

  “What do you call it if you have it in the bedroom?”

  “A hell of a lot of fun if you do it right.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Ramsey didn’t get to his office until early afternoon the next day. He’d been busy with phone calls to Monterrey, Mexico, and phone calls to Mexico were more difficult and complex than calling Australia. He had spent a frustrating three hours trying to get some needed information on the whereabouts of a dialysis machine, most of which had been spent simply trying to reach Dr. Garza.

  When he finally got to his lab, he saw that Dottie was at the computer. She turned, frowning as he entered. She said, “Dr. Ramsey, have you been fooling with the computer?”

  He stopped short of his office door. “Me? Fooling with that thing? I’d just as soon touch a live snake. Why?”

  “Because someone phoned it and spent from about six p.m. until nine fifty trying to access your information and research file.”

  “What do you mean, ‘someone phoned it’? Does my computer have a telephone number?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “What? Why?”

  Dottie rolled her eyes as if she couldn’t believe anyone didn’t know about this. “Say you were in some other location and you wanted some information out of your files. You’d just get to another computer, dial your number, and then access your information files with the password.”

  “How do you know somebody ‘phoned up’ my computer?”

  “Because I programmed a trap into it that would tell me when the computer is turned off and on. And I shut it down yesterday before lunch, when you let me have the afternoon off. So, if you didn’t do it, who did? Someone tried awfully hard to discover your password, tried for four hours almost. Until almost ten o’clock.”

  “What, does that thing have a clock in it, too?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “What will they think of next? Does it give head?”

  She blushed, deeply, even though she should have been used to Burton Ramsey’s unrestrained language. “The code words they tried for passwords all had to do with you. Obviously, someone who didn’t know that you never use a computer was trying to break in. They were very determined, but they never had a chance, because they didn’t know that I programmed the machine and devised all of the passwords. Who do you think it was, the progress committee?”

  He shook his head. “Nah. They can get at my files a
ny time they want just by asking. It’s in my contract. Besides, at ten o’clock last night they were all at home pretending to have sex with their wives.”

  “Then who could it be?”

  He thought for a moment and then smiled grimly. “Sounds to me like the work of the rat thief.”

  “Dr. Williams?”

  “Haven’t you heard? Dr. Williams is extremely interested in what I’m doing down here in this little ol’ laboratory. I thought it was the talk of BioTech.”

  Dottie said, hesitantly, “I think I did hear something.” Then she looked up at Dr. Ramsey. “What are you going to do, report her? We can’t really prove it unless I put a trace on the computer that will cause her computer to identify itself.”

  He was starting to smile. “No need for that. I’m fairly certain of who the culprit is.” He knelt over the workbench by the computer and quickly scrawled out, on a blank sheet of paper, a long, four step chemical equation. He handed it to Dottie. “Can you put that in the computer, separate from the other stuff? Make it look like the big casino? Put some kind of program in that leads her straight to this?”

  She looked at the paper uncertainly. “I suppose so. You want her to see this? It looks quite important.”

  “Oh, it is. It is. It’s one of the three major medicines in the world.”

  “What are the other two?”

  “Sex and alcohol. Don’t you know what that is?”

  She studied the paper and shook her head. “No. But I’m a biology major.”

  “Yes, I forgot that. God forbid a biologist should learn some chemistry. But you can put this in that Rube Goldberg invention and lead our good Dr. Williams to it? Correct?”

  “Sure, but what shall I label it?”

  He thought a moment. “Call it the X-Factor Serum.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. Just sounds mysterious.”

  He waited while her chubby little fingers nimbly worked over the keyboard. After a few moments, she looked up. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. We’ve baited the trap. Now we’ve got to guide our rat to its mouth.”

  “Huh?”

  He walked around, thinking and jingling the change in his pants pocket. “I think it’s pretty common knowledge that I’m leaving BioTech in less than a month. That supposedly puts you out of a job.”

  “But I thought you had it fixed where I’d be the assistant to whomever takes over your lab?”

  “I do. But that’s our little secret. Dr. Williams doesn’t know that. And she won’t know it when you go down and ask her if she might not have an opening for a lab assistant.”

  “But she’s already got a lab assistant.”

  He grimaced and grabbed his hair with both hands. “Argh . . . Dottie, I am trying very hard not to strangle you. Fine. We both know she’s got a lab assistant. But she knows you’ve been my lab assistant and I’ve got something she badly wants and you’re going to let on you know where it is. Not directly, you understand, like you were selling out completely, but obliquely. You’re going to tell her that I can’t use a computer, that you do all the programming for me from my notes. And you’re going to keep on telling her that until she finally figures out that it has to be you who put in the passwords, which you are going to change to your first name right now . . . ‘Dottie.’

  “And you keep saying your name, over and over, Dottie, Dottie, Dottie. Maybe she’ll get it, maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll ask you what you know about my work, and you’ll just tell her only what’s in the notes I give you, and they’re all about chemistry and you’re a biology major. Just be yourself, Dottie. Just act like you’re really going to her for a job. Now, can you do that?”

  She mulled it over in her mind a moment. “I think so. But isn’t it dishonest?”

  “Not if you put yourself down for twenty hours of overtime this week.”

  Her lips rounded. “Oh!”

  “Yes. Oh! Just remember, you own the computer and all the goodies are stored in it. Tell her I have a ritual of burning my notes every evening and dancing around them buck naked and smeared with paint. She’ll probably believe it.”

  “When should I do this?”

  “Anytime Dr. Williams is in and her assistant is out. Maybe this afternoon. The sooner, the better. I think her assistant leaves at five and Williams usually works late. What do you think?”

  She studied on it for a moment. “I think she deserves it. Dr. Ramsey, do you know she lied to me? She told me that you and she were good friends and she knew all about your research.”

  “Why, that cur!” Ramsey laughed delightedly. Williams’s attempt to break in to his computer had relieved Ramsey of all of his guilt about forcing her to tell her story under false pretenses.

  * * *

  Kat Williams was waiting with ill-concealed impatience for Kevin to arrive. It was nine in the morning, and usually, unless he had a school schedule interference, Kevin was right on time. On this morning, of all mornings, he had decided to be late. But Kat was feeling so satisfied and relieved that she was willing to overlook the young man’s minor transgression. Still, she was impatient to get on with the information she now had in hand.

  The night before, thanks to Ramsey’s ditzy assistant, she had easily accessed the computer using Dottie’s name as the password. Her first name, she’d thought, now, that was certainly clever thinking—and so original. Of course, she had no intention of hiring the young woman when Ramsey left, but it wouldn’t hurt to let her think the job was going to be hers. There was no telling what else she might be able to glean about Ramsey’s formula before he was gone for good.

  When her phone rang, she answered it, thinking it was probably Kevin calling to explain why he was running so late.

  “Hello, Kevin . . . ?”

  “Hello, Kat. This is Dr. Diane Washburn.”

  “Oh, hello, Diane.”

  “Did Kevin talk to you about my visit with Angus yesterday afternoon?”

  “No, not really. He did say you wanted to talk to me, though.”

  “Kat, this is a very hard call to make, but I think we need to talk about when we’ve let Angus suffer enough.”

  “What?”

  “Kat, Angus has very severe arthritis in both of his hips, and it is progressing into his spinal vertebrae. I’m afraid before long he is going to lose control of his bladder and bowel functions.”

  Kat felt her heart sink as she glanced over at Angus sleeping in his bed. “Are you talking about putting him down?” she fairly sobbed.

  She could hear the doctor sigh over the phone. “Not immediately perhaps, but, Kat, I think the time is not far off. After all, Angus is thirteen years old, and that is a very advanced age for a Scottie.”

  “But . . . but . . .”

  “All right, Kat. I can see you are not ready for this right now . . . but I want you to start thinking about it, for Angus’s sake. I don’t know how much longer I can control his pain.”

  “Okay, Diane,” Kat sobbed. “I will, I promise.”

  When she hung up, she went right to Angus’s bed, sat down, and pulled him into her arms, sobbing into his fur.

  After a while, Kat got control of herself. She took Angus for a short walk in the park and told him over and over how much she loved him and how much he meant to her. From the look in his adoring brown eyes, she knew he understood.

  Now Angus was back in his bed, chewing contentedly on a Greenie, and Kat was examining the data she’d stolen from Ramsey’s computer files the night before.

  She was certain she had what she was looking for. Once she had gotten into the computer, the programming had led her straight to a complicated-looking chemical equation that Ramsey had dubbed, in more blazing imagination, the “X-Factor.“ Kat could only conclude that Ramsey had seen too many early 1950s science-fiction movies.

  She did not know what the chemical equation was, but she knew it was important by the devious path she’d had to follow t
o find it. Her chemistry was weak, but it didn’t matter. Kevin was a doctoral candidate in physical chemistry, which was one of the reasons Kat had chosen him as her assistant.

  She’d gained the information just as she had begun to despair. To make certain that Ramsey’s serum had been the catalytic factor in her rats’ much-improved behavior, she’d ordered a group of rats of the same strain as those she’d taken from Ramsey’s lab, and of the same age. She had inoculated them with exactly the same serum as she had the original six rats from the Ramsey group. The results had been the same old failure she’d experienced before, except the brain cell deterioration had occurred faster because, as she’d expected, of the rats’ age.

  The six rats of the Ramsey group that she had been using as a “control” she’d realized were not control subjects at all, since they, too, had been injected with Ramsey’s serum. She had run them through the maze along with a control group of normal five-year-olds. Even without her NeurActivase serum, Ramsey’s rats had done better than the new control group.

  And then there had been the breeding. To her surprise, she’d noted that all of the rats of the twelve she’d taken from Ramsey’s lab were actively breeding. Five-year-old rats occasionally bred, but with nothing like the activity she’d been seeing. These rats were acting like teenagers in a testosterone storm!

  The progress of the original group had continued until they seemed to have settled down to running the maze in a little over three and a half minutes, a phenomenal time that indicated the rats were at least three times as smart as rats were supposed to be. But Kat’s elation at how well the dually injected rats were doing was tinged by worry that she would not be able to learn what Ramsey had originally injected the rats with.