They came to a closet next to the door into the animal lab that was locked. A slender professor type asked what was inside.
“Just some storage,” Mack said. He used a key from his pocket to open the closet when the man insisted on seeing for himself.
“Hmm,” the man said. How could he find so interesting a closet stacked to the ceiling with Baxter supply boxes?
The man moved on to the hood—the piece of equipment with controlled air flow, allowing work with hazardous substances or sterile solutions. He fiddled around with some switches for a few seconds, wrote something on his iPad, then moved to the incubator—a giant silver box which looked like a fridge. When he touched the handle to open it, Mack grabbed his arm and asked him not to, explaining through tight lips that the temp inside needed to remain as constant as possible.
The man grunted but complied with Mack’s request. The tension oozed out thick enough to clog the flow hood. I was relieved when they finally signaled they were ready to leave. In fact, I was so happy to get out of there and give Mack a break, I didn’t mind that my taskforce of anal-retentive Inspect-Yours, Inspect-Mine wanted to go to the OR and swab for bacteria in the soap dispensers.
I got away from the germ police as quickly as possible and, before anyone could request we go clean a refrigerator, I vamoosed out of their sight, took the back way through the ER to leave the hospital without them seeing me again, and lit out for home.
Chapter 15
On Monday morning, my schedule went back to normal—at least for me. You can’t really call it normal when the only other people awake with you live in China.
Over the weekend, Mack and I had talked once on the phone, but something interrupted him so the call was short. It was nice while it lasted. And at least it gave us a chance to compare schedules and realize it was going to take some work to see each other. Mack was going to be staying on Days and I was returning to my usual night shift. But since I’d slept all Sunday night, I decided it was a perfect opportunity to give a surprise visit to my new boyfriend on his day shift.
I swiped my badge at the front entrance of the hospital, waved hello to the guard, Al, and headed toward the elevator. I should have taken the stairs to earn my breakfast sundae, but I felt a little lightheaded today. Probably all the romance on my mind. Left me breathless and all-a-quiver.
I trekked my way through the labyrinth of hallways that would take me to Dr. Mackenzie’s underground world. I hoped my visit would be a pickup in his day, a piece of sunshine in the midst of his dreary, dark existence in the basement. A breath of fresh air in his stagnant drudgery.
Being in love produced such poetry in my heart.
I stuck my head through the doorway, and stopped midway through Hi, Handsome when I discovered Mack in a close powwow with none other than Carl Schroeder. Schroeder gave me a nasty glare, which made my heart squeeze.
Mack stopped rubbing his temples and looked up, appearing like a kid caught reading his dad’s magazines.
Schroeder closed the medical record they were studying and shoved it into a drawer. Then he picked up his cup, said We’ll talk later to Mack, and pushed past me out the door. I pressed away so he wouldn’t brush against me as he left.
Mack offered a weak smile.
“Whacha doin’?” I said, hoping my voice didn’t reflect that all the air had gone out of my Happy.
“Just going over some stuff.”
“I thought I’d surprise you. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“That’s okay.”
We shared some awkward silence.
“What are you guys working on?” A little small talk about work.
“Our project. Can’t say, really.”
“Right. Secret.”
“Actually, there is one thing I need to ask you.”
“Sure.”
“You remember the Trent patient?”
That again.
“Sure.” Maybe through cooperation I could learn something more about their interest in Nikki.
“Do you remember her saying anything unusual about her pregnancy or health history? Anything at all?”
“Like what?”
“Something she did unusual, something that might have affected her pregnancy, or more importantly, the fetus.”
“Well, she was on gobs of meds, if that’s what you mean.”
Mack narrowed his eyes. “What kinds of meds?”
“Something for asthma—theophylline and a steroid, and an anti-fungal. Her toenail had issues. And some meds for bipolar disorder. Plus some others.”
“Her OB didn’t change her meds for the pregnancy?”
“She didn’t have much prenatal care.”
“Do you know exactly which meds and doses she was on?”
“No, it was too much to remember. A couple were illegal and I didn’t even recognize two of the drug names. Had to look them up. And she had some routine she worked out herself for taking them. I couldn’t begin to tell you off the top of my head. But I wrote it all down in her history.”
“Why isn’t that in her chart?” He sounded edgy.
“It is.”
“It’s not there.”
“You must have missed it. I put it in. The computer was down, so I had to write it all out, and I made sure it was in there.”
He took a deep breath. He was frustrated. Then he opened the drawer Schroeder had just closed. Out of it, he withdrew Nikki’s hospital chart.
“What are you doing with that?” I asked.
“I need it for my research.” He started flipping through, looking for the information. “It’s not here.”
I peeked over the chart as he flipped through the pages.
“When did you take this?”
“I checked it out from Medical Records a few days ago. Don’t worry. I didn’t steal it or anything.”
I guess I sounded accusatory. “I didn’t mean that. She had an infection and was readmitted. That always messes up the folks in Medical Records. They might have already broken down her chart when the floor wanted it back. Maybe they only got part of it scanned in by the time the floor needed it again and sent just part of it.”
He nodded with new light in his eyes.
“Call Medical Records and I bet you’ll find the rest,” I said.
He picked up the phone, punched in four digits, and found out I was right. The rest of her chart was on another floor waiting to be returned to the records department.
He asked that a messenger bring it right down. Of course, messengers never brought anything right down. It would probably take at least another phone call and a couple of hours before they even found the chart. But that would give me a few minutes to do my own detecting before he got all absorbed again in whatever he was working on.
“Can’t you give any hints about what you’re doing?”
Mack looked at me for the longest time.
“Come here. I want to show you something.”
He led me into the inner lab on the other side of the big window. In the cages lining the walls, the cats were lounging on their platforms suspended at many different levels. Mack went to a cage with three identical Tabby cats. Two were cuddled up together on the floor of the cage, one of which lazily pawed at the other’s tail every time it twitched past. The third watched us from a high platform like we were the most boring creatures on earth.
“I want you to meet some friends of mine.” He opened the cage and picked up one of the cats curled together on the floor. The one he left got up and mimicked the Saint Louis Arch with a high stretch of its back.
He nodded toward the cat on the highest perch who was apathetic to our presence. “Up there is Harriet. She’s the boss. And this is Harriet Too.” He cradled her like a baby and scratched her behind her whiskers. Her purr was loud. “And this princess,” he reached down to scratch the lower back of the one stretching, “is Copy Cat.” He handed Harriet Too to me and picked up Copy Cat. “Over in that cage is Harriet Too Two. We just call her T
utu.”
“Wait a minute. Are they—”
“Clones. Well, Harriet isn’t. She was the DNA donor. Harriet Too and Tutu are her clones. They don’t get along, so they live in separate cages. Then we used some of the frozen embryos left from the original somatic cell nuclear transfer of Harriet’s genome material to make Copy Cat six months later.”
“Wow, I didn’t know you could do this. I’ve heard of Dolly the cloned sheep, but she died young, didn’t she? Had all kinds of health problems? I didn’t know it was possible to clone other mammals.”
“There have been amazing advances since Dolly. Pigs, cattle, mice—even dogs and cats, though canines have proven trickier than felines.”
“Amazing. But what’s this got to do with Nikki’s medications? Or her baby’s PKU?”
He took a deep breath. “The Trent baby is a clone.”
I laughed. “No way. Nikki’s just a kid off the street, and so is the father, a big black—wait a minute. Are you serious? Is that why Nikki’s baby wasn’t black?”
“So it would appear.” Mack looked miserable.
“What?” I screeched. “A human clone?”
Mack rubbed his palm over his face while an exhausted-sounding sigh leaked from deep inside him. His eyes reflected pain, like it’d been there a long time and he really wanted to not carry it alone.
“It’s complicated.”
“Try me. I made an A in pre-algebra. I’m pretty good at Complicated.”
He considered some more, like he was about to tell the big secret he’d crossed his heart and hoped to die about keeping and wasn’t going to relish sticking a needle in his eye if he spilled the beans.
“Actually, there is both good news and bad news.”
“Give me the bad news first. Then the good can comfort me.”
“Nikki wasn’t supposed to receive the embryos. It was Carl’s mistake.”
“Unbelievable!”
“I told you it’s complicated.”
“Okay, first—tell me about the cloning. Is that what your research is about?”
He sighed again. “Yes. I was working on human cloning. When the government pulled the plug, I was just on the brink of success and I couldn’t stop, not completely. Carl still had discarded human embryos available, so at first, I was working within the stipulations imposed by the government, but when we ran out, I just couldn’t stop. Not then. I was so close. Carl didn’t want me to stop either, so he continued to provide me with the embryos. Of course, they are unwanted and to be disposed of anyway.”
“That’s illegal.”
He grimaced.
“That’s immoral,” I added.
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
I decided not to argue right then.
“How is Carl involved with Nikki?”
“Before he took his new position, he had a busy practice—mostly infertility patients. When a woman can’t produce eggs but wants her own biological child, there have been times when we’ve attempted cloning. Carl gets me the embryos and the DNA. I do most of the embryology—like the DNA sequencing and getting it into the cell, incubating the embryos, and so on—then Carl does the transfer into the mother.”
“What happened with Nikki?”
“That was a mistake. Carl was careless. He had too much going on at once.”
“What do you mean mistake?”
“I think she was just in for some pelvic pain or something. The woman who was expecting to receive an embryo transfer was in a different room. Carl didn’t check the chart, went into the wrong room, didn’t even look at his patient and did the procedure. The Trent girl had no idea what he did to her.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Carl said enough that I put the missing pieces together. When Carl told me about the Trent baby’s birth and asked me to do follow-up genome studies on her, that confirmed it for me.”
“Did you discuss it with Carl, demand that he take responsibility?”
“I tried. He said I was crazy. That the Trent baby was a friend’s granddaughter and he just needed to have a paternity check run. So he gave me a blood sample to run against the baby.”
“And?”
“It matched the baby’s PKU. Exactly. That couldn’t be, if it was a paternity test. Only if it was her own blood…or a clone.”
“Are you saying I gave Anna a cloned baby?”
“She might be a perfectly normal person.”
“We can never tell her. But we have to. But she’ll worry so much. I can’t believe this!”
“I think it’s going to be okay.”
“Please tell me where in this that there is good news.”
“In spite of it all, the incredible thing is we succeeded!” His eyes sparkled, like the feat of a successful baby clone made up for the horrific error of putting embryos in the wrong patient.
“Why didn’t you tell Nikki?”
“Me? I wasn’t her doctor. I never met her. I told Carl he should, but he refused. And he told me to keep my mouth shut.”
“Who cares what Carl says? You’ve got to tell Nikki.”
“But I’m so close.”
“To what? The finish line to some Nobel Prize?”
“I want to help others. If we could figure out how to make these cells grow, we could help so many people, like those with Parkinson’s or with spinal cord injuries.”
Again, unbelievable!
“I can’t believe you helped cover this up. It’s unethical, illegal, unprincipled, dishonest. You can’t just go around illegally making babies, put them in the wrong women, and then not even tell them.”
I really, really cared about Mack, but I just couldn’t let this go. I wasn’t thinking of the consequences of my actions. I just kept pushing, wanting somehow to take care of Nikki and the other women who had been used.
“How could we have told her something like that?” he said.
“The same way a doctor tells his patient he’s really sorry but he blew it and took off the wrong leg, or say, ‘Sorry ma’am, I’m human and I gave the wrong dosage to your child and now he’s dead.’ I don’t know. You just do it and live with the consequences.”
“I never even see the patients. And all my work would stop.”
All my work would stop. Duh. “Of course your work—your illegal work—would stop.”
“I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Well, you did. I’m going to Schroeder. If he won’t agree to confess, I will for him.”
Mack didn’t say anything. His sad eyes might have even looked grateful, like he’d waited a long time for someone to catch him and end the torment. I could help liberate him, help him find his way back.
Then again, maybe the pain in his eyes was disappointment in me. I couldn’t tell. But he said nothing to stop me.
So I whipped around to make a grand exit. I expected him to say something, anything, but nothing came.
Now there was no choice. I had set my course. No going back now.
Chapter 16
While the steam was still spewing, I had to see Schroeder. I wasn’t about to let him off the hook now that I knew what he’d done to Nikki. I suppressed the feelings he’d given me with that glare of his. I didn’t want to wait long enough to realize how scared I should be.
I stormed up to Schroeder’s office, tramping past the Nazi, and barged through his door.
She yelled after me, “You can’t go in there!”
Oh, yes! I could. And I did.
I found myself standing in the center of Schroeder’s office, the object of my fury sitting at his desk. When I flew through his door, he slammed shut the notebook he was studying and jammed it into a desk drawer.
“What do you want?” he said.
The Nazi showed up behind me, sweating and puffing. It had taken her a full thirty seconds to heft her fleshy carcass out of her chair and sprint the seven feet to his door. “I’ll call security, sir.” Oh, she would love to see me hauled off in irons.
/> “I’ll take care of this, Ingrid.”
Ingrid, go sit down and mind your own business. Eat another Snickers. Your boss won’t want you watching me make ground turkey of him.
She left but was careful to leave the door ajar so she wouldn’t have to miss all the action.
I closed it myself.
“Miss Johnston. Once again you’re impertinent.”
“I know all about you.”
“Do you?” He sounded very smug. And he looked like if he had an iota of patience before, he sure didn’t anymore. It had just left the building. I had to talk fast before my fraidy-cat side started pointing out that I might as well don a fluttering red cape and run back and forth in front of a wounded bull.
“I know you impregnated Nikki Trent with a clone, and I know you’re helping Dr. Mackenzie continue human cloning research illegally.” There it was. Now I tried to be smug.
His face changed from smug to hurt. Was this going to be so easy? Maybe he was tired of the lies too, and just wanted out of this nightmare. Maybe I did need that cape after all. Kate Johnston, superhero with the super power to release all criminals from their guilty existence!
“Jim, Jim, Jim. Why is he doing this?”
I hesitated. “What?” My confidence faded a notch.
“Did he tell you some heart-wrenching story about paralyzed people and some awful mistake I made transferring to the wrong patient?”
Cool, suave, I played for time. “Maybe.”
“I thought he’d stopped this nonsense.”
“Whaddya mean?” I started fidgeting. Glad I hadn’t jumped onto his desk, stance wide, arms akimbo, waiting for the wind to lift my cape and flap it in the breeze.
“I did no such thing. Baby Trent’s grandfather was an acquaintance of mine. When Ms. Trent became pregnant, he asked me to see her, to make sure everything was okay. His son was the baby’s father and he wanted to do the best he could for his grandchild. That’s why she came to me instead of the clinic. He paid for it out of his own pocket.”
“Oh.” What was I supposed to say?
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