Fatal Care

by Leonard Goldberg

  “You don’t want to know the answer to that.”

  They approached the back of the laboratory where Eric Brennerman was conducting an experiment. Blood was being pumped through a long, slender glass tube and then through coils before emptying into a large flask. The blood flowed into the flask and sat there a moment; then it was pumped out again into another glass tube that curved around and connected to the front tube, forming a closed circuit system. Brennerman watched the blood moving in a smooth, even fashion. He seemed pleased.

  Hoddings cleared his throat audibly.

  Brennerman looked over and waved. “I’ll be with you in a second.”

  Abruptly, Brennerman turned off the pump in his experiment. The flow stopped. The blood remained stationary in the tubes. Brennerman watched the clock on the wall. Thirty seconds passed. Then a minute. Then two minutes. He started the pump again and the blood moved smoothly. No clots had been formed.

  Brennerman gave some instructions to a nearby technician and then walked over. He was a well-built, handsome man with a strong jawline and dark hair that was slicked back and held in place by some sort of gel.

  “Hey, Joanna,” Brennerman said genially. “What brings you to Fantasyland?”

  Hoddings’s face tightened at the word Fantasyland.

  “Business,” Joanna said. “I need some information from you.”

  “You got it.”

  Joanna motioned over to the experiment Brennerman had just completed. “Is that blood in those glass tubes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why didn’t it clot when you stopped the pump?”

  “Because it contains an anticoagulant,” he explained.

  “Is there anything unusual about the anticoagulant?”

  “It might be heparin.”

  Joanna’s eyes widened. “Have you discovered the gene that produces heparin?”

  “Could be,” Brennerman said vaguely, not wanting to give out too much information.

  Joanna glanced back at the blood in the glass tubing. Heparin was an excellent, widely used anticoagulant whose chemical formula was so complex it had never been synthesized. All heparin now used in patients was extracted from porcine intestines. If Brennerman had discovered the gene that coded out for heparin, it was worth billions of dollars. She wondered when his company would go public.

  “Tell me about this information you need,” Brennerman broke into her thoughts.

  “Perhaps we’d better talk in your office.”

  They walked across the spacious laboratory and entered a small, cluttered office. Shelves on the wall were packed with books and journals and scientific manuscripts. On the floor were stacks of computer printouts.

  Brennerman plopped down in a swivel chair behind his desk and gestured to two director’s chairs across from him. He waited for Joanna and Hoddings to be seated. “What can I do for you?”

  “I need information on your artery-cleansing agent,” Joanna said.

  “Anything in particular?” Brennerman asked.

  “I need to know what’s in the solution that’s injected into patients.”

  “The purified enzyme and a preservative,” Brennerman said carefully. “Why?”

  “I’ll get to that in a moment,” Joanna told him. “What’s the preservative?”

  “Benzyl alcohol.” Brennerman looked back and forth between Joanna and Hoddings. “What is this all about?”

  “Two of the patients who underwent the artery-cleansing procedure have developed cancer,” Joanna said straightforwardly.

  Brennerman’s jaw dropped. “What!”

  “Two of the thirty subjects in the study have come down with malignancies,” Joanna went on. “One patient had a rhabdomyosarcoma, the other an astroblastoma.”

  Brennerman rocked back in his swivel chair, stunned by the news. “But these cancers are so rare and so different from one another.” He rubbed his temples and tried to concentrate. “It’s hard for me to envision one enzyme or any other single agent inducing two such diverse cancers.”

  “We don’t know if that’s the case here,” Joanna said. “But we have to investigate that possibility.”

  “Of course. Of course,” Brennerman said quickly. “I’ll help in any way I can.”

  Joanna reached into the pocket of her white lab coat for a stack of file cards. “Let’s begin with the composition of the artery-cleansing solution. Are you certain it contained only the lipolytic enzyme and a preservative?”

  “Absolutely,” Brennerman answered firmly. “We checked each batch a dozen ways for purity. There were no contaminants present.”

  “Do you have samples from all the batches which have been used in patients?”

  “We do.”

  “And you’d have no objection to our retesting those batches for purity?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  Joanna went to the next card. “Are the batches of the purified enzyme all made here at Memorial?”

  “No. They’re produced at our plant outside Lancaster.”

  Joanna looked up from her card. “In the desert?”

  Brennerman nodded. “The land was cheap and security was easy to maintain. But now we’re in the process of building a plant in Thousand Oaks.”

  “Doesn’t Amgen have a plant out there?” Joanna was referring to Amgen, Inc., one of the world’s largest and most profitable biotechnology companies.

  Brennerman smiled without humor. “Yeah. We want them to see us coming.”

  Joanna glanced down at her file card and asked, “Once the solutions of enzymes are shown to be pure, what happens next?”

  “They’re frozen away until used.”

  “How are they transported from Lancaster to Memorial?”

  “By helicopter,” Brennerman replied. “It’s brought into Memorial by either me or my associate, and it’s always hand-carried. The frozen solutions are thawed just prior to being injected into patients.”

  “Who is this associate you mentioned?”

  “Dr. Alex Mirren. He’s a senior research scientist at Bio-Med.”

  “He’s also an adjunct professor of genetics at Memorial,” Hoddings added.

  Joanna jotted down the information. “Is he also involved in the production of the lipolytic enzyme?”

  Brennerman nodded. “Absolutely.”

  “So,” Joanna said, mentally tracking the lipolytic enzyme from production to injection into the patient. “The solution arrives at Memorial and is hand-carried to the facility where the artery-cleansing procedure is done?”

  Brennerman nodded again.

  “Who does the actual procedure?”

  “Either a cardiologist or radiologist, depending on which arteries we’re injecting.”

  “Are you or your associate there for the entire procedure?”

  “Every second of it.”

  Joanna went to her final file card. “Before the enzyme was used in humans, I take it that it was extensively tested in experimental animals?”

  “Man, oh, man!” Brennerman said, sighing heavily. “We tested it in God knows how many dogs and rats and rabbits. We even used monkeys, which cost us a fortune. We never saw one adverse effect.”

  “Were their hearts and brains studied?”

  Brennerman hesitated. “I think representative studies were done.”

  “But you don’t know how many hearts and brains from those animals were viewed under the microscope?”

  “I’d have to check the lab data books.”

  Joanna pushed her chair back. “I’m going to have to visit your plant out in Lancaster.”

  “Any time.”

  “Tomorrow is Friday,” Joanna said, thinking about her full schedule for the next day and the day after that. “We’d better make it Monday morning.”

  “Is there anything in particular you’ll want to see?”

  “I want to look at all the microscopic slides on the experimental animals that received injections of the lipolytic enzyme.”

 
“You’re talking about thousands and thousands of slides,” Brennerman said. “You might want to limit yourself to slides of the animals’ brains and hearts.”

  “I want all the slides,” Joanna told him. “And I want to see all the data books that go with them.”

  “I’ll have everything set out for you Monday morning.”

  Joanna pushed her chair back and stood. “And, of course, there will be no further clinical trials on the lipolytic enzyme until this matter is settled.”

  “Of course,” Brennerman and Hoddings said at the same time.

  “Thanks for your help. I can find my way out.”

  Joanna walked back across the laboratory to the glass cubicles. She paused to again study the plants they contained. The corn stalks were growing so tall and looked so green and healthy in the natural light. Yet if their husks were stripped away, one would find ears of corn producing their own pesticide that killed not only pests, but other forms of life, as well. And someday it might also harm humans. After all, it was a pesticide and people would be eating it. And only God knew what the pesticide might do once it got into the human body.

  Joanna wondered if she was looking at a Frankenstein crop—one that had been genetically modified to help man but ended up hurting him. Some scientists considered the idea of a Frankenstein plant paranoid nonsense, but others believed it was just a matter of time before it happened and turned out to be another example of science run amuck.

  Joanna sighed to herself, wondering if the two cases of cancer occurring in the artery-cleansing study had been induced by scientists tampering with something without fully realizing all the consequences.

  Behind her the door to Brennerman’s office slammed shut. Joanna turned and watched Brennerman and Hoddings arguing heatedly and pointing fingers at each other. She could hear their muffled voices coming through the glass partitions of the office.

  Joanna left the laboratory, thinking that there was going to be a lot of yelling and finger pointing at Memorial before everything was said and done.

  9

  With her binoculars Sara Ann Moore carefully studied the parking lot just inside the fence surrounding the Bio-Med Corporation. The target’s car was still there. It hadn’t moved since 8 A.M. Slowly she scanned the ten-foot chain-link fence with barbed wire atop it. The main gate was manned by an armed guard inside a kiosk. And soon, Sara thought, when night came, guards would be patrolling the grounds around the plant. And she had heard guard dogs barking, but hadn’t seen them.

  “Shit,” Sara growled, unhappy with the progress she’d made in setting up the hit. The doctor seemed to spend every waking minute either here at the plant or at Memorial Hospital. He had no outside life. None. And the only reason he went home was to sleep.

  Sara lit a cigarette and tried to concentrate on the doctor-scientist she had to kill and make sure the death looked accidental. The hit couldn’t be done in the plant because it was too risky trying to get inside. And it couldn’t be done at Memorial because the doctor worked in a genetics institute. Where everybody knew everybody, strangers stuck out and were easy to spot. And besides, she pondered, how do you kill somebody accidentally in a genetics lab?

  The guy had no outside life. No girlfriends, no buddies, no hobbies, and no habits she could zero in on. She had been following him for five straight days, and all he did was work and work and work. But she would keep following him, tracking him day and night, looking for the opening she needed. It was there. All she had to do was find it.

  Sara opened the window of her rented truck and felt the chilly evening air. She flipped her cigarette out and quickly closed the window. Dusk was falling rapidly, and so was the desert temperature. Sara had on jeans, a sweater, and a woolen coat, but she was still cold. Rubbing her hands together, she hoped she wouldn’t have to spend another night on the desert. Damn this place, she thought miserably. And damn the isolation and frigid air that came with it.

  She was parked at the rear of a huge empty lot across the highway from the Bio-Med plant. Her truck was actually parked on a dirt road at the far northeast corner of the barren lot. Some large boulders and scattered sagebrush in front of her partially concealed her truck from the highway. If anybody asked her why she was there, she would tell them she was a hiker, planning to camp out. In the back of the truck she had the appropriate camping equipment.

  She resisted the urge to turn on the heater. That would require starting the engine, and someone on the highway might see the truck’s exhaust. Screw it! She’d stay cold.

  To pass time, Sara turned on her laptop computer and logged onto the Internet to see how her stocks were doing. Pfizer was up a point and going strong since it had announced its plan to merge with Warner Lambert. That stock would stay solid, Sara thought, as long as Pfizer kept making Viagra. Ah, Viagra! The elixir of youth for men, guaranteeing them perpetual erections. And Delta was doing fine, too. The giant airline was gobbling up smaller regional and commuter lines, solidifying its hold on the entire Southeast. Sara decided to buy more Delta with the money she’d receive for the hit on the doctor. And maybe more Pfizer, too.

  A pair of headlights came on in the parking lot across the highway. Sara reached for her binoculars. The doctor’s car was moving.

  Sara turned on the truck’s ignition and drove slowly toward the highway, her headlights off.

  10

  Joanna slumped down wearily onto the metal stool in the special autopsy room. It was eight o’clock and she’d just completed the postmortem examination on the Russian immigrant. They still didn’t know the victim’s identity, and the autopsy hadn’t given any new clues. She glanced at the ten bottles on the shelf, each containing a well-preserved fetus. She wondered if she had enough energy to do a few fetal autopsies before she called it a night. Maybe one, she thought, and pushed herself up from the stool.

  The door to the room swung open, and Lori McKay entered. She was wearing a green scrub suit that was stained in front with blood and perspiration.

  “How are you doing?” Lori asked.

  “I’m running on fumes,” Joanna said, and gently stretched her back, trying to ease some of the tightness. “Did you get enough tissue from the drowning victim to make slides?”

  Lori nodded. “I think I did for most of the organs, but it wasn’t easy. There’s so much putrefaction present after a week in the water.”

  “Did you get enough lung tissue for us to look at under the microscope?”

  “More than enough.”

  “So now all we have to do is find the victim’s latest skull X rays.”

  “I’ve got them,” Lori said. “They’re up on the view box in the big autopsy room. And I’ve got Harry Crowe ready to saw through the guy’s skull for us.”

  Joanna looked over at the preserved fetuses. “Can we wait a while on that?”

  “We’d better not,” Lori advised. “Harry is already pissing and moaning because he had to stay so late.”

  They went out and down a long, empty corridor. From behind a closed door they heard Elvis Presley music, followed by high-pitched laughter. Then Elvis came back on.

  Lori asked, “Did you find anything in the immigrant from the bottom of the pit?”

  Joanna shook her head. “There was nothing new. He had a tattoo of a cross on his arm, a mouthful of metal teeth, and some deep calluses on his hands. He did heavy work, that’s for sure.” Joanna thought back to the victim’s muscular arms and wondered what he had to lift to develop them. “Did we get back the analysis on the material I scraped out of the calluses?”

  “It came back this morning, but I don’t know how helpful it’s going to be.” Lori took out a stack of file cards and quickly flipped through them. Then she flipped through them a second time before finding the card she wanted. “They found some unidentifiable threads and some scattered bits of copper in the callus. Some of the copper bits were coated with a plastic-like material.”

  Joanna concentrated on the findings, wondering if the threads
were from gloves the man wore at work. No, she quickly decided. If he had worn gloves he wouldn’t have developed calluses. “The copper is the key here. Isolated bits of copper suggest he could have been a plumber or pipe-fitter. They use copper pipes and tubing.”

  Lori squinted an eye, unconvinced. “He could have worked in a factory, making computer parts or something.”

  “No, no,” Joanna corrected her. “Remember, this man had muscular arms. He did heavy labor. A plumber would fit better here.”

  “But what about the pieces of copper covered with plastic?”

  “That takes us down a different road,” Joanna said. “The plastic coating on the bits might represent copper wiring with insulation, and that’s something an electrician might use.”

  “So he could be an electrician or a plumber.”

  “Or both.”

  “And they also found grease embedded in his callus,” Lori went on, turning the file card over. “You know, like some kind of lubricant.”

  “Like a mechanic might use?”

  Lori shrugged. “I guess.”

  “So,” Joanna concluded, “he could be a plumber or an electrician or a mechanic or a jack-of-all-trades.”

  “Great,” Lori groaned. “That narrows our suspect list down to about a half-million.”

  They came to the swinging double doors of the main autopsy room. As they pushed their way inside, Joanna said, “Later tonight I’d like you to remove every callus that man has. I want them all analyzed thoroughly. In particular, I need to know the source of that copper. See if they can determine whether it came from wire or pipe. And I want them to define and characterize that grease. We need to know what it’s used for.”

  Lori nodded as she committed the instructions to memory. But she was also thinking that again she’d missed the boat. And again her inexperience had cost her. She had failed to follow one of Joanna Blalock’s cardinal rules. Milk every clue for everything it’s worth because it may be the only clue you’ll find. Lori had accepted the analysis of the callus at face value, not looking beyond the findings and interpreting their full meaning.