by Hillary Avis
Kernel of Doubt
A Neela Durante Mystery
Hillary Avis
Published by Hilyard Press, Eugene, OR
©2018 Hillary Avis www.hillaryavis.com
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people, places, events, or organizations is purely coincidental, and all are the creation of the author.
Cover by Mariah Sinclair www.mariahsinclair.com
Editing by Linda G. Hatton www.inktracksediting.com
For permissions contact:
[email protected]
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Kernel of Doubt (A Neela Durante Mystery, #1)
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
Recipes
About the Author
Stay in touch!
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Chapter One
Neela slid her plate across the cafeteria table. “This pie is amazing. You should have some.”
Demetrius leaned forward and dug in. “You're ruining my diet.”
She laughed because it was the opposite of true. When she picked him up for carpool this morning he had already run fifteen miles on the treadmill in his garage. The man could afford a piece of sweet potato pie or three.
“I hear they make these with taters from the test fields.” He grinned cheekily around his mouthful of pie.
Neela swatted him on the arm as she cleared her cafeteria tray. “Don't even joke about that.”
“You can't leave me here alone with this!” Demetrius caught her elbow when she passed.
“Work!” she called back over her shoulder, buttoning her lab coat as she went. She wanted to stay and watch him eat a little longer, watch his lips thin out over his teeth when he smiled. Maybe that was the reason she always drove them to work and he never returned the favor. Their carpool was mostly a smiles-per-gallon arrangement.
By the time the elevator doors closed, Neela saw that he was already sharing the sweet potato pie with An-Yi, one of the data analysts, forking pieces of pie crust into her mouth like buttery gifts. Demetrius was not the type to sit around sulking.
The elevator dinged upward to the lab on the fourth floor. While she would miss the warmth and energy that Demetrius brought to any room, the lab was Neela’s sanctuary, dark and patient. It was where her ideas germinated.
Neela swore under her breath when she heard—and then saw—Miles Hutto, head of Research and Development, trying to catch up to her before she made it down the hall. It was an unspoken rule that the R&D team never stepped foot into Neela’s lab, and her team never went into theirs. If she could just make it to the blue door marked “Quality Assurance” before he caught up, she wouldn’t have to deal with him until the four o’clock meeting. Not for the first time she wished she had her oldest sister’s long limbs, and willed her own shrimpy legs to stretch to their limit.
Miles, as usual, could not be put off by speed walking. He reached over her head and held the door shut, clamping his clipboard and a sheaf of papers under his other arm. The guy wasn’t even out of breath. Neela flapped her elbows in an attempt to dry her underarms. Then, realizing she probably looked like a ruffled hen, which lent very little to her scientific credibility, she stopped and looked Miles in his squinty pale eyes.
“What do you want?” she asked, knowing exactly what he wanted.
“About 375...” He didn’t need to finish his sentence since he’d been hounding her about this one as long as she had known him.
“We can discuss it at the meeting,” Neela said firmly.
He frowned. “No need to be coy, Dr. Durante. You’ve held this project up long enough.”
“Fine, I’ll give you a preview—it’s going to miss the window.”
“It’s imperative...the FDA...millions...irresponsible!” He sputtered something in German, his English failing him like it did every time one of his pet projects didn’t make it down the pipeline according to his timetable. Basically, every time he spoke with Neela. “Why are you standing in the way of this?”
“I’m not going to approve a trait until I’m absolutely sure it’s not going to kill people. I have to run down every path until I can see the dead end.” Neela shrugged. “It’s what I do.”
“You know as well as I do that 375 is a rubber-stamp job.”
Anger knotted in her stomach. “I’m not a rubber stamp, Dr. Hutto, and I resent the implication that QA testing is just a formality.”
“Actually, in this case, it is. We don’t need you to get FDA approval. We can use the old reports for the individual traits. I don’t even know why Campbell let you put your hands on this. He should have pushed it through himself instead of bringing in a second-rate post-doc to do it for him.”
“Art recruited me for a reason,” Neela said quietly, stung. “Talk to him about it.”
“You can be sure I will. If you can’t do your job, Art should hire someone who can.”
“I’ll see you at four,” she said, and when his hand dropped to his side, she opened the door and went through it. As it closed, Neela’s eyes burned with the effort of keeping her tears in check. She leaned against the blue door to prevent one of her team walking in on her. A kind face would be the end of her composure.
Lately she broke down nearly every day from the pressure to perform, most often in a stairwell or the sparsely populated women’s bathroom on the fourth floor. Everyone, from R&D to Marketing, seemed to “just stop by” her office and check on the progress with 375, which was excruciatingly slow. Even her boss Art Campbell, usually laid-back and gentle with her, had seemed on edge waiting for her final report. A dozen other traits had breezed through the pipeline in the meantime, but this one, with its elusive mystery protein, stuck in her craw. She just couldn’t sign off until she was sure.
Only a few more days and I can be done with it. I just need to make it through today’s four o’clock meeting.
R&D had turned 375 over to her more than a year ago for testing, expecting her stamp of approval within months—if not weeks. Even Neela had anticipated a quickie when her team put it through its paces in the grow rooms, since 375 was a triple-stack, a mash-up of three traits that had all been vetted in previous years and were performing well in the marketplace individually. Combine them all into one plant—a no-brainer, right?
It didn’t quite work that way. The 375 plants went gangbusters in the grow rooms, showing all the attributes they expected. Her team ran the rest of the tests just as a formality, so they could put it in the report for FDA approval. Then an unexpected protein showed up in the Western blots that couldn’t be accounted for, and that threw a wrench into everything.
Of course, it wasn’t uncommon for a random protein to pop up in new trait combinations, a side effect of the imprecise gene insertion. It meant Neela’s team h
ad to do extra work, isolating the protein and testing it on livestock animals to ensure its safety for humans and cattle. The extra proteins were almost always harmless, but Neela had to check them all, anyway. That was the job.
This protein was different, though. It was weirdly difficult to isolate. It took months just to get a pure sample, setting the whole project behind schedule. As a newish Broad Earth employee, Neela felt the failure keenly, especially with Miles Hutto and the rest of R&D breathing down her neck the whole time. Small consolation that she was the one to discover that the protein was more stable if it was isolated from the plant stem rather than from the leaves or seeds. Nobody cared that she’d worked seven days a week for months. It was her fault that trait 375 was late. She should have figured it out sooner—that was the general consensus in both wings of the fourth floor.
In her office, she pulled the file up to prepare for the meeting. She scrolled through the contents she had added over the last year. The exceptional grow room reports, where 375 out-performed every trait combination Broad Earth had ever produced. The PCR results showing the three genes were inserted properly. The endless pages of notes from their attempts to isolate the protein. The incriminating Western blots with their narrow striped columns—so many layers of information in those gray and black bands. The rogue protein was marked on each row, a wide dark line near the top. Even the data sheets from the animal trials, still being analyzed at that very moment by the data team downstairs, were in the file.
The whole QA process had pushed up against the FDA deadline for approval and even a few days’ delay was too long for the seeds to go into production this year. Miles was right, this would cost Broad Earth millions—perhaps billions—but Neela could not sign off in good conscience, not without seeing the regression analysis from the animal trials. That, and the autopsy reports. There had been some mortality in both rats and sheep. Probably not statistically significant, but it worried her.
Neela decided to head down to the meeting early and stake her claim on a good seat in the conference room—one near the head of the table near where Art, her boss and the director of this particular Broad Earth research facility, would sit. Though he was as impatient as anyone to see 375 make it to market, he would support her decision to stand by the test protocol. Being a little early would also let her relax and settle her nerves before everyone else showed up.
She paused on the stairwell landing to message Demetrius. She counted on him to amuse her during these excruciating meetings with his one-liners and promises of a stop at the Waffle Nook on the way home. When she turned on her phone it almost leaped from her grasp, ringing and jangling and buzzing. Three voicemails, a half-dozen texts, and a calendar alarm from Art. The meeting time had been moved up—and she was already late!
Just as she realized this, the third-floor door swung open and hit the wall of the stairwell with a bang.
“There you are!” Ted Chalk said urgently. “Where have you been?”
Neela gestured lamely with her phone. “I didn’t get the messages until two seconds ago. I keep my phone off so I won’t mess anything up.”
He shook his head disbelievingly. “For a scientist, you are the least technical person I have ever known.”
“That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”
Chalk didn’t even seem to hear her halfhearted joke. “Listen, they’re all waiting for you, and the table is packed with suits. I don’t even know where they brought them all in from. Definitely a couple from St. Louis headquarters. Lisa Campbell is here, I am not even kidding you.”
He guided her toward the conference room as he filled her in on the situation. “We don’t have more than a minute before they send someone to get us. You must, must, must put on your gloom-and-doom face and insist that something is wrong with 375 or they are going over your head and pushing this through today.”
“Uh, Chalk, you are touching me.” His OCD meant he usually stayed a good three feet away from people, even his good friends like her. She couldn’t think of another time he’d even brushed her arm by accident.
He withdrew his hand from the small of her back. “I was touching your lab coat.”
She cracked a smile at him, partly to reassure him and partly to lighten the mood so she could face the firing squad. “I think we’ll both live.”
“That remains to be seen,” he said dourly, and twisted his hand in his pocket to wipe off the germs.
Neela took a deep breath and entered the conference room, Chalk a few steps behind. He sat down on the bookcase along the side of the room, where somebody’s lab assistant and An-Yi were also perched. A seat had been reserved for Neela, a lonely chair at the foot of the table with its back to the door. All the other chairs had been moved toward the head of the table where Lisa Campbell, Art’s ex-wife and the VP of International Product Development, now sat. A row of Broad Earth heavyweights in suits, who apparently needed no introduction, sat to Lisa’s left, their faces displaying the full gamut of emotion from boredom to outright anger. To her right, Art and the R&D team.
So it was an ambush. Neela wondered who had orchestrated it. Miles, probably. She took her seat.
“Thank you for joining us, Dr. Durante.” Lisa’s voice dripped with disdain. “We are so grateful that you could grace us with your presence.”
Neela nodded as solicitously as she could manage. Art shot her a sympathetic look down the table. Less sympathetic was Miles, seated to Art’s right, who couldn’t even look her in the eye. Screw him for not telling her about the meeting time change when he mugged her in the hallway!
“If you could pull up the file,” Lisa continued pointedly, “for the benefit of the St. Louis team?”
Chalk flipped open the conference room terminal and pressed a few buttons. A screen descended behind the R&D team and the file for 375 appeared. Neela started to get up and speak, but Art was already on his feet and talking across the table to Lisa and her suits.
“BE-375 is a triple-stack hybrid corn line that our development group, led by Dr. Hutto, has been working on for the last three years. It contains three complementary traits in one product. As the name implies, it stacks Traits BE-3, BE-7, and BE-5, which together already comprise a 65 percent market share in the American Midwest. We believe this product has worldwide relevance in temperate growing zones, due to its pest-resistance above and below ground, its increased yield in high density plantings, and its innate herbicidal properties that suppress weed growth in surrounding soil. The 375 line has been extensively tested by Dr. Durante’s QA group and is primed for FDA approval next week.”
Primed for approval?! Neela nearly inhaled the pen cap she’d been gnawing. Art was flipping through the 375 file quickly now, highlighting the extraordinary grow room performance, the purity of the line, the methodical checking and rechecking of every attribute that her team had performed over the past year. The suits were excited and had completely forgotten their irritation with her, but the R&D group and the assistant sitting next to Chalk had their phones out and were tapping away at their screens. They were either texting each other, or this was old news to them—the same crap they had discussed at every four o’clock in the last six months, and they were checking FaceSpace or whatever. When Art reached the slide about the animal trials, Neela waited for him to explain the necessary delay.
“Flying colors,” he said smoothly. “We’re good to go on this one.” He pulled up a regression analysis showing a 98 percent confidence and a narrow margin of error.
Neela squeaked involuntarily. Art shot her a wink. He beckoned to An-Yi, who stood up with a file of papers trembling in her hands, and immediately flushed red to her hairline. “Ms. Ming has been working overtime to get this done, and my team here may not have seen the final analysis.”
Neela sat back in her chair. Hutto was glowering at the tabletop—he must have been in the dark about this, too. An-Yi circled the table, handing copies of her analysis to each person. Most of the St. Louis people turned them ove
r and started doodling on the back. Neela scanned the top page and was shocked to see a note at the bottom: “Mortality and Morbidity 0%.”
“Wait!” she blurted out. “What about the animal deaths?” The whole room turned toward her in one ominous motion.
“The autopsy report is stapled to the back,” Art said soothingly. “The sheep were found to have a virus unrelated to the trials and so were excluded from the results.”
“Did the rats have the same virus?” she asked.
“You’ll find it all in the report. Thank you, Neela. Thank you, Miles. We appreciate your hard work on this project. Ted, please stay to assist us with the audiovisuals.”
Dismissed before she could embarrass him any further. Thanks, Art. As Neela filed out with the R&D group, she heard Lisa Campbell take over the meeting and begin a discussion about branding.
Miles motioned for his team to go ahead without him, and then they were alone in the hallway. “I didn’t know,” he said quietly.
“It’s fine, Miles. It’s over. You won.”
He shook his head. “It’s not so simple, is it? I saw what happened in there. Art steamrolled you—I’ve never seen him behave that way. You said both animal models had unexplained deaths?”
Neela gave a terse nod.
“Don’t you think that’s unusual?”
“I do. But apparently it doesn’t prove out in the analysis.” Neela shook the report, the pages fluttering.
“An analysis you haven’t vetted—haven’t even had time to read. Nobody has read it, have they? I know I haven’t. I doubt Art even had time to look it over.” Miles’s expression was earnest, searching. “That’s also unprecedented. Maybe he pushed it through due to pressure from headquarters.”
“What do I know? I’m just a rubber stamp.”
He sighed. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you upstairs.”
She relaxed a little at his admission. “It’s fine. It’s over. We can all move on.”
“If you don’t mind, I want to take a closer look at the numbers overnight. Something about this just doesn’t sit right with me.”
