by G. H. Ephron
“I’ve been meaning to ask your advice on something,” I said, trying to sound ingenuous.
“My advice.” His face turned wary, and he checked his watch.
“Won’t take a minute. You see, I’ve been offered an opportunity. One of the reps from Pharmacom was telling me about some promising new drug therapies they’re investigating. It’s not secret information or anything—there have been news stories and all, I just hadn’t read them. Anyway, I’d like to invest in the company. And then I thought, I’d better run that by somebody, just to be sure it’s kosher.”
He tilted his head and gave me an appraising look. “Pharmacom. Isn’t that the company that’s sponsoring Dr. Liu’s research?”
I tried to look surprised. “Why, yes, I guess so.”
He sniffed. “Both the institute and the med school have clear guidelines. The research is going on, on your unit. Under your watch, as it were. Not kosher.”
“That’s a shame,” I said, checking into my pocket to be sure I had Destler’s envelope announcing an Acu-Med stockholders meeting. “I hate to pass up such a good opportunity. Well … I guess that answers that.” I paused. “Unless, of course, you’d consider investing for me?”
He looked surprised. Then wary. “Surely you’re not serious. It would be as much a violation of ethical standards for me as it would be for you. If not more so.”
“If … not … more so,” I repeated the words. “And here I thought you owned stock in Acu-Med.”
“I …” Destler turned pink and stammered. “Well that’s different.”
“How is that different?”
He narrowed his eyes, checked his watch again. “I really have to be somewhere,” he said, turning to go. “Why don’t you call Virginia and make an appointment so we can discuss this when I have more time.”
I pulled the Acu-Med envelope out of my pocket and unfolded it. “I believe you have to own stock in order for them to send you one of these. Stockholders’ meeting. Addressed to your wife.”
“How the hell … ?” Destler snarled. He snatched the envelope out of my hand and crumpled it in his fist. “Son of a—”
“Isn’t owning stock in these companies discouraged, prohibited even, because it can cloud clinical judgment?” I asked. “For example, just suppose two physicians at the institute are working on therapies to treat the same condition. And suppose an administrator has a stake in the company sponsoring one of the studies. Mightn’t that person be tempted to behave in a way that encourages one line of research and discourages the other. After all, there could be a considerable amount of money at stake.”
Destler stuffed the envelope in his coat pocket, rocked back on his heels, and gave me an appraising look.
“Of course,” I continued, “the bias might be subtle. More resources made available to one researcher. When there were efforts to discredit the other researcher, the administrator might suddenly develop tunnel vision. When a little investigation would have shown the evidence was suspect”—my voice rose—“trumped up.”
He laced his fingers over his midsection and pulsed them against one another. “You’re improvising,” he said.
“You showed me Dr. Temple’s research because you wanted me to see that she included subjects that were too old for the Kutril protocol. Did you know that those overage patients weren’t even in her study?”
“That’s absurd,” Destler barked.
“Someone took patient records that belong in Dr. Jensen’s DX-200 trial and planted them in Channing’s Kutril trial data.”
He gawped at me. It was possible that he was hearing this for the first time. “What are you saying? That Dr. Temple poached patient records from Dr. Jensen’s research and put them into her own, to make her numbers look better?”
“Even you can’t seriously think that. Dr. Temple was meticulous, and she was smart. If she were going to cheat, why not pick patients that fit her protocol? No. I think someone doctored those records and inserted them into her research.”
Destler had turned ashen.
“And the diary. Evidence of a psychiatrist gone around the bend, having a sexual relationship with her patient? The only thing it demonstrates, for sure, is that Dr. Temple had sexual thoughts. We all have sexual thoughts. It comes with the turf. What matters is what we do with them. Dr. Temple wrote hers down. There’s no evidence here, no evidence at all that she acted on them. Did you check? Or did it just suit your purposes to set the rumor mill in motion? So much neater and tidier when pesky radicals resign. Or kill themselves.”
“Now hold on a minute,” he blustered. A pair of nurses walked by. Destler lowered his voice and glanced behind him. “Surely you’re not suggesting that I had anything to do with Dr. Temple’s death.”
“I’m not suggesting anything. Yet. But I would like to know how you got the journal pages. Did you steal them? Or did you get someone to steal them for you? I’m quite certain Channing didn’t offer them up as a birthday gift.”
“Of course I didn’t steal …” Destler sputtered. “I’ve had quite enough of this … this inquisition,” he said, his voice stony with rage. “How dare you suggest that I’ve been tampering with research, sneaking around in a colleague’s office.” He felt in his pocket. “Though I can see why you’d think so, since you seem quite capable of doing so yourself.
“And now, I have a meeting to go to.” He turned on his heel and left.
I hurried over to the Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Unit, convinced that I’d blown it with Destler. I still didn’t know who’d tampered with Channing’s research or how Destler had gotten his hands on her diary. All I’d managed to do was piss him off, and warn him so he could engage in his favorite activity—damage control. I rode the elevator up to the fourth floor.
The doors to Channing’s office were open. As I approached, I got a wave of fresh-paint smell. I looked in. Spattered drop cloths covered a formless mound of furniture, pushed to the center of the room.
The door to the rest room at the end of the hall swung open. Daphne came out. She was carrying a glass coffeepot filled with water.
“Peter!” She sounded surprised, guarded. “What brings you up here?”
One side of her sweater was hanging lower than the other—she’d mismatched the buttons and the buttonholes.
“I was looking for Dr. Dyer,” I said. “Is she up here somewhere?”
“She’s about,” Daphne said vaguely. “Popped over to sort through what’s left in Channing’s office.” Daphne peered into the empty office. “You checked under the shroud?” She backtracked to her own office, leaving a wake of flowery perfume.
I stared after her. The comment was bizarre. Out of character and out of place. And she appeared a bit disheveled. I followed her, intending to ask if she was feeling all right. But she went into her office and closed her door behind her. I took it as clear indication that she wasn’t interested in my solicitude.
I returned to Channing’s office. The painters could have at least left a window open a crack to dissipate the smell. I went around to the double-hung window and opened the latch. The woodwork was still tacky. I tried to raise the window, but it was painted shut. I took my keys out of my pocket and ran a key tip up the window edge on one side and down the other, slicing through the paint. Then I set my palms under the top edge of the bottom window and pushed. At first it wouldn’t budge. I pressed as hard as I could, feeling the strain first in my arms and shoulders and then down into my torso and legs. The window gave way and flew up, letting cool air into the room and sending me ricocheting back into the pile of furniture.
I tried to regain my balance, expecting to feel the hard edges of a desk or bookcases or file cabinets beneath the drop cloth. Instead, I felt something firm but softer. I jerked away. I pictured Jess, crumpled beneath what now had taken on the sinister aspect of a shroud. It was absurd—the power of suggestion. I took hold of the edge of the cloth. It was heavy with stiffened paint spatters. I started to raise it.
<
br /> “Dr. Zak?” The sound of Jess’s voice wasn’t coming from under the tarp.
Jess peered into the room. She was carrying a stack of file folders. “You all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at neuro rounds?” I snapped.
“Am I? What’s today? Oh, my gosh, you’re right. I completely forgot about it.”
“It might help if you had your beeper with you.”
She touched her jacket pocket. “I don’t?”
“No. It’s back on the unit, in your backpack, which you left sitting open on the table.” I paused to let that sink in. “And you said you were going to come up and see me in five minutes.”
She blinked at me. One of the file folders slid from the top of the stack. I retrieved it for her.
“I’m not usually like this,” she said.
“I can believe that. If you were half as unreliable as you’ve been lately, Dr. Temple never would have trusted you to coordinate her research. You wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.”
“She did trust me. That’s why Dr. Smythe-Gooding asked me to come over and help archive her research.”
“I hope that trust wasn’t misplaced,” I said.
Jess put the pile of folders down on a chair. There was a skim of perspiration on her upper lip.
“Are you ready to tell me what you were you doing in Dr. Temple’s study during her party?”
“I was putting back her journal.”
“Putting it back? Did she know you’d taken it?”
“No. I … I borrowed it.” She hurried on. “And I was trying to put it back. Only I wanted to be sure I put it in the right place. And then I heard you, outside on the landing, so I ran out. And then …” Her voice trailed off.
“And then Channing got murdered,” I said, “and you couldn’t return it.”
Jess’s face convulsed, and a tear started down one cheek.
“Why on earth did you take it in the first place?”
“I know I shouldn’t have”—her words came out in a rush—“I guess I was just curious. Wondering what kind of things she wrote in it. When I read what she wrote about me, I wished I hadn’t. She wrote about things …”
I wanted to shake her, but I kept my voice calm. “Things that you knew had never happened.” Jess nodded miserably. “Didn’t you understand what she was doing?”
“I know. Countertransference analysis. It’s fine in the abstract. Or when it’s me writing about my own patient. But this was about me. It was so”—she searched for the words—“raw. Sexually explicit. Even though I knew it was pure fantasy, I felt like I’d been violated.”
“Haven’t you had sexual thoughts about a patient? About your own therapist even.”
Jess blushed. “Everyone does.”
“Of course. It’s what transference is founded on—it’s libidinal. You can’t avoid it. And as therapists, it’s necessary to fully understand the transference so that it doesn’t affect the relationship. Channing used CTA to push those thoughts and feelings to their logical conclusion, to the extreme. By writing them down, she was robbing them of their power to distract her. That’s all.”
Jess twisted her hands together. “I know, I know. But when I read them …”
“So let me get this straight. You steal Dr. Temple’s private journal.” I was trying not to yell, but I could hear my voice rising. “Then you show so little regard for her privacy that this afternoon you leave it lying in your open backpack.”
“I didn’t mean to!” Jess said, cowering.
“You know Dr. Destler has copies of pages from that journal. He’s been showing it around. Using them to make it look as if Channing had sexual relations with a patient.”
“I never showed it to …” The words died out.
“You never showed it to Dr. Destler. But you did show it to someone.
“He promised it would be confidential.”
“Who?”
“Oh, God,” Jess moaned. “I brought it to Dr. Jensen because I trusted him. And because I couldn’t bring myself to ask Channing about it. I should have realized. Why would he offer me a job? How pathetically naive …”
“He offered you a position when you’ve finished your residency?”
“Said I could work with him, managing outpatient services in the new Research Institute.”
“What new Research Institute?”
“You know, the Albert House renovations.”
“Huh?”
“You didn’t know? It’s going to have outpatient offices, new research facilities. And when Dr. Smythe-Gooding retires …”
“Retires?”
“How long can she continue? Everyone knows, she’s barely holding it together. I’ve heard now it’s even worse. They’re saying that without her husband, she’s ineffective. Flaky, and then some.”
“But she’s still getting the work done, isn’t she?”
Jess shrugged. “The research programs she’s supposed to be running were pretty much running themselves. When there was a problem, Channing covered for her.”
Items from the list in Channing’s journal seemed to float above me. More rigid and inflexible. Forgetful. Insecure. That’s why Channing came to me. She saw her friend, her mentor, changing, she found herself questioning the judgment of someone she’d always trusted—and she was worried about her continuing to work with Olivia.
I remembered the half-full sample pack of Ativan on Daphne’s desk. It wasn’t Channing but Daphne herself who was taking anxiety medication. Too much Ativan could explain what Jess wrote off as flakiness. But I had a feeling more was going on. Something beyond grief, compounded now by more grief.
“No one’s said anything to Daphne about it?” I asked.
“And get your head bitten off?” Jess picked up one of the folders she’d been carrying. “It’s a shame there’s no one to continue Channing’s work. I imagine they’ll just throw these in storage somewhere.”
“Research files?” I asked.
“Yes. Patient data. From a research study she published few years ago. At least I’ll make sure it’s properly archived.”
“I wonder. You coordinated her research. Were you aware of documentation on additional subjects getting added to the Kutril data, after the fact?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Well, wasn’t there a usual way for a patient file to get created, and for information to get entered into it?”
“Of course. We had standard procedures. She always gave me the forms. I entered them into the system, then filed the hard copy.”
“And did any patient records come in any other way? Maybe someone other than Dr. Temple gave you patient records to be included in the study?”
“Oh yes, but that was after she died.”
“What was after she died?”
“Dr. Jensen. He gave me, maybe three or four records. You don’t think …”
“And you entered them into the database and put them in the file.”
“Of course.”
I wondered in how many other ways Jess’s superiors had taken advantage of her. “I think Jensen may have used you,” I said. “I believe he had you add those files to make it look like Channing included patients that were too old for her study.”
“No. She was meticulous about selecting participants.”
“I know that. But Jensen wanted to make it look as if she would stoop to anything to achieve her goals.”
“He used me—” Jess froze, like a cat suddenly alert to an alien sound. We both looked at the open office door. With a crash, the outer door slammed shut. Before I could spring to my feet, I heard the scrape of metal against metal and a click. Someone had padlocked us in.
26
I TRIED the door. The knob turned, and the door opened a crack, then held fast. I pressed my shoulder into it, pulled back, and rammed it. I pulled back and rammed it again. Pulled back a third time—and thought better of it. I wa
s going to break my shoulder before I broke the hasp. It already felt as if I’d hit myself with a sledgehammer.
I rubbed my shoulder and cast about for something to pry the opening. I pushed the tarp from the pile of furniture I’d fallen against. There was Channing’s leather chair, loaded not with a dead body but with a pile of books topped by a crocheted afghan and a piece of scarlet and gold silk.
I picked up the shimmering cloth. I remembered—it was a scarf Channing had brought back with her from Thailand. She’d worn it around her shoulders on the evening she gave me the bad news, that she’d met someone while she was away, she was going to get married. I rubbed the stiff silk. The sharp citrus scent made my eyes prickle.
I heard Jess’s rapid breathing. She was staring at me, wild-eyed, her nostrils flaring. She went over and tried the door. “We’re trapped,” she said. “How are we going to get out of here?”
I pushed the other drop cloth off the top of the desk. There was a phone, a cord coiled neatly around it. I tracked along the baseboard until I found a phone jack. I plugged the phone into the wall and picked up the receiver. Nothing.
“Kaput,” I said.
Jess’s voice rose. “Someone’s got to get us out.” She threw herself against the door and banged with both fists against the solid oak. “Help!” she screamed. “We’re trapped in here!”
She turned around and pressed her back against the door. Her eyes darted around the room. “I have a problem,” she gasped, her hand to her throat. “Being locked in. Knowing I can’t get out … .” Her breath was coming in quick pants. Her face was starting to flush.
“You’re hyperventilating,” I told her. I scooped the books off the leather chair. “Sit.” I took her hand and helped her over to the chair. “Easy does it.”
“I know, I know,” she gasped again. “It’s not like it’s the middle of the night.” She gripped the chair arms.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “Don’t talk. Breathe.”
“There’s all kinds of people around, right?”
